A closer look
Sometimes discovering history requires a shocking lack of academic finesse. For centuries, everyone assumed Homer's Troy was purely fictional. Enter Heinrich Schliemann, an incredibly wealthy, dangerously enthusiastic amateur who decided to find it in 1870. He actually located the ancient ruins in modern-day Turkey, but because he possessed zero archaeological patience, he used massive amounts of dynamite to blast his way to the bottom layers. He found Troy, but he practically destroyed half of it in the process.
