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What historic unsolved mysteries do you want solved?
This isn't just about crimes like the identity of Jack the Ripper, DB Cooper, the fate of the two English princes locked in the Tower of London, or what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. There are so many mysteries throughout history that are unlikely to ever be fully solved or explained, that we can only theorize about.
What is the Voynich Manuscript? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? Why was the Mary Celeste abandoned? What's up with the Dyatlov Pass Incident? What's the real story behind the Pied Piper of Hamelin? What did Anne Boelyn really look like?
There's an infinite wealth of mysteries throughout history, so which ones do you find the most intriguing? Bonus points if they're more obscure, or a smaller local one!
A pretty minor one, but still: Albert Einstein's last words are unknown. He spoke them in German, to an English nurse. That said, there's a good chance it wouldn't be anything special so the intrigue of the unknown might actually make it better.
"Das ist keine art zu leben"
By the way, some context for a couple I mentioned that may not be quite as commonly known:
There was actually some promising investigation into Dyatlov Pass recently. Researches used the snow simulation technology developed for Frozen (yeah, the movie!) and simulated what an avalanche in that region could do to a person and it appears to match up with what was found. Here’s an article about it.
I listened to a fascinating discussion about Dyatlov Pass on You’re Wrong About a few years back, and they mentioned this!
A lot of work of many ancient Greek philosophers ( Stoics in particular ) has been lost.
I would love it if someone literally dug up a lost copy.
It would also be cool to know which writings of the major religions attributed to the founders are really their teachings and which were added in their name by people who came after them.
I’m sure you have seen this, but in case you haven’t: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvrq7dyg6o
There’s some progress being made in attempts to read burnt, rolled up Ancient Greek scrolls!
Oh good, I was worried that it would be the ancient world equivalent of a CVS receipt. :-)
Due to ambiguity in these statements, I choose to believe the human and computing ingenuity they are calling for here is to test the philosophy itself.
I am haunted by that stat that is like, we have lost 99% of all human knowledge over time. Which ofc, take with a grain of salt, because how could you ever really know all that is lost, since it does not exist, by the nature of the word.
I can relate.
On the other hand I have seen many great ideas re-developed independently over the centuries. There is a good chance that whatever was lost from the Greeks probably popped up somewhere else. Especially systems of thought based on empirical observations.
Still, it would rock to see what those lost works are.
Do you have any recommendations of historical diaries ? Or other primary sources that are stream of consciousness in style ?
Meditation by Marcus Aurelius is a big one. Some chapters are just him pondering, others are -what I can only describe as- ancient Roman listicles of people around him, and some are philosophizing and expressing stoicistic thought.
Since it's basically his diary, you don't get more stream of consciousness than that.
It's a tough read. You have to sit down to parse and ruminate on the sentences or expressions to grasp their meaning. Meaning that sometimes can be interpreted differently. I can't just start reading it like it's an intriguing novel, I have to be in the right headspace to begin with. It took me a while to get through even half of it.
I can vouch for this one!
If I find anything that is like - common people rants or common people lols I will report back lol.
It’s a bummer that a lot of our slice of life will never be from common people. It’s hard to get into some of the texts we do have.
I've always said they if I were granted one time access to a time machine, what I'd really want to see if a slice of life. Just hanging out on a Roman plaza watching kids play and grown ups trip on their robes.
I don't even need to travel, if I could just watch, less Rome for me and more pre-roman Ireland and Britain, Cahokia (so much of the Americas pre-colonialism), Ethiopia, Sudan (Nubia and Kush), Mongolia, so many different parts of ancient China.
Turns out literacy wasn't necessarily for the commoner! It's difficult to find primary sources from commoners that weren't at least semi wealthy and educated.
Would you say folk song or other records of spoken word are going to be a good place to look?
I even would like to see "old timey psychologists" I guess, writing down the thoughts of others - or did we not even interview and record the thoughts and feelings of commoners?
The closest I can think of off the top of my head, was reading about the story of Schmidt as relayed by Taylor (who was a complete asshole). I guess it tells us something, records of the past suggest that the record keepers felt that the non-record keepers were complete inhuman animals, and talked about them as such.
I guess my fantasy would be for them(Taylor) to ask "Schmidt" "Do you think you are 'close' ?", in reference to this statement in the text:
I'm curious if Schmidt would even register the offense. I am not dense enough to think that people don't know when they are being insulted to their faces, even if they don't understand the word choice, there are other telltale signs. But I can't really put myself in the situation, in their reality of the time, to truly know what the response or conversation would be like.
I genuinely do not know. I'm not well versed enough to give you an answer that will satisfy.
Just thinking about it though I'd argue that folk song is a good place to glean how life may have been, but I'd be hesitant to take oral history at face value. Simply because song, poetry, or other methods of oral history are liable to change over time and are prone to wrap language in metaphors or allegories.
Relying on (mostly urban and wealthy) psychologists to accurately describe what the average serf experiences would be fraught with inaccuracies and biases.
Interesting thought though!
Ah right, like the great many “statues and idols of fertility gods and goddesses” which a modern (or rather, less bashful and more sexually aware) lens might translate to “people were horny, so they made sex toys and boob statues”
I can't think of any. If you find anything good let us know!
This one is local - who killed King Rama VIII of Siam?
I think if the truth comes out it might have some effects on Thailand's politics, but it might be a bit late now.
In 1946, The king was found shot dead in his bedroom in the Grand Palace. The crime scene was cleaned before the cops arrives. The initial announcement ruled the death as suicide. Later, the opposition party spread rumors that the prime minister was behind the assassination. A court trial ruled that the 3 pages in the palace are party to the crime and all 3 were shot to death in 1955.
Today people believed that it is either suicide (which forensic disagrees), assassination by unknown party (such as the Japanese or American, since the murder weapon was a Colt), or accident self-harming (the pistol was his, he was toying with it and it was loaded). There's another theory published in 2013 which I need to self-censor here as it is highly illegal for me to write about it.
Other than that, I find it intriguing that we know a lot about Earth's surface and even space but I don't think we know everything under our ocean yet.
Does your self-censored theory have anything to do with the king’s successors?
Oh damn you sent me down a rabbit hole with this one. Kudos to whoever wrote the wikipedia article bc it gave me just enough info to be really curious. I wonder if we'll ever know for sure.
Spring-heeled Jack. There are many rumors and legends, but the one thing people can't deny is his vertical. Possibly explained in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden: Gaiden.
The story behind various dancing manias.
The circumstances of different initial zoonotic spillover events, and whether we gave human pox to anything?
Oh yeah, I planned to use him for a quick little tongue-in-cheek story before I got sidetracked by us selling our house. I'm willing to believe some prankster (or group of them) did dress up and jump around, and from there it quickly spiraled into an urban legend that got embellished with each retelling.
The dancing manias are fascinating to me. It seems to likely be a form of mass hysteria, but for it to result in dancing? And dancing to the death no less? It's just such an odd "symptom" to me since from what I know, most mass hysteria events emulate physical ailments like dizziness, nausea, seizures, etc.
Though the Wikipedia page mentioning musicians playing alongside the dancers because they thought it would treat the mania feels pretty funny and out of touch even by medieval medical standards. Ah yes, surely the thing that drives healthy people to dance will make these sick people stop dancing!
I am incredible amused by your reference to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. I have never met another person that has played it.
Well, origins of COVID - does that count?
Though I have a strong opinion on that, it is not widely shared, which I find surprising. Additionally, the topic is still heated and politicized so one cannot expect a calm discussion on it.
I'll just get this one over with: UFO sightings and whether and, if so, how aliens visited Earth.
If so, I'm pretty damn sure that it's not as per History Network's own Londo Mollari.
One of mine is decidedly in the crime sphere.
I do truly want to know what happened in the JonBenet Ramsey case.
What is truly at the center of the earth - I.e direct probing of it?
What are the full spectrums of human vision (reinvigorated by the super green discovery)?
What other links do we have between smell and disease (inspired by the Parkinson’s story) ?
What is the life like of a giant squid and what other creatures are lurking below ?
Why was stone henge built lol ?
What is life in North Korea really like ?
I could go on for days.
What's the super green discovery? My initial attempts to search it bring up some organic health supplement/powder, and then I found this article about a new color named "Olo". That seems likely to be it based on a skim, but want to double-check!
Yes, that is the specific discovery I'm talking about! Sensory discoveries are obviously on my mind atm, lol.
In general, I think we have a lot of medical discoveries that I hope to uncover, but some of the lower hanging fruit will come from a. more people with disorders/different biology will survive than before because of advances in medicine and standards of living b. unappreciated groups of people will be studied more seriously.
I think we have a pretty good handle on what the full spectrum of human vision (380nm to 750nm with very slight differences). I think of particular interest are tetrachromats and how they percieve color.
We kind of lucked out in a way with how bad the biological eye is at detecting color. All we have to do is slightly vary the intensity of green, red, and blue lights and we can make a display that's basically indistinguishable from real life color for us. That's not how color works in reality though. Mixing green and red light doesn't give you yellow light, we just percieve it that way because there's no such thing as a yellow cone cell. Yellow light equally stimulates L and M cone cells, so you can just turn on a green light and a blue light, mix them together, and our stupid monkey brain just automatically assumes it's yellow. Another interesting point is that the color purple isn't real. It's just something that our brains made up.
The color violet is at the far high end of the human vision range, and the color red is at the low end. When you mix blue and red light, our brains somehow interpret that as purple, a similar, but distinct color from violet. In reality, violet and red are at completely different ends of the spectrum, and are as far away from each other as possible within the human visual range, but somehow our brains have tricked us into thinking they're similar, and we've invented the color wheel, color theory, the paint industry, and so forth based entirely on this horribly flawed perception of color.
To a creature that has four or five or 100 types of cone cells, color would look entirely different. That's pretty interesting to me! I always try to imagine what that would seem like, but because I've gone through life with only my 3 stupid cone cell types, it's difficult to imagine.
Just jumping in here to disagree. Color is perception, color does not exist without something that can see. Light of various wavelengths exists if course but color is a trait that can only be given by an observer.
Further, "To a creature that has four or five or 100 types of cone cells, color would look entirely different." is just speculation. There's the classic "what if your red is my blue" thought experiment but taken the other direction it's entirely possible that our visual cortex interprets trichromat color the same way in essentially the same way a decachromat would. And that's not just speculation. The mantis shrimp has 12 different cones because their simple nervous system cannot do the post-processing ours does and testing has found they have worse color differentiation than we do. Humans can even see a bit of the ultraviolet side if we have part of our lens removed that normally filters it out, as with cataract surgery.
There are human tetrachromats but they aren't superheros, they have somewhat better color differentiation in the red-green part of the spectrum. If there was something special about "yellow" light they would see it.
That's true, I was using color as shorthand for wavelength and intensity of light but they're not quite the same thing. The point I'm making is that our eyes can't give us an accurate read of the wavelength of light, even in the visual range.
We can't tell the difference between green and red light mixed in specific proportions versus pure yellow light. We can't tell the difference between violet and specific shades of purple, and so on. We can measure the response of readings along three peaks along the EM spectrum and interpret those readings as a color, but the fact that we only have those three peaks to go off of means it's very easy to fool us by manipulating colors that correspond to those peaks.
To make a screen that would look like real life to a tetrachromat, you'd need an additional subpixel on monitors; one of the frequent telltale signs of tetrochromia is that the colors on screens don't look accurate to real life to them.
I think more sets of cones would have diminishing returns, but depending on where their sensitivity lay, it would allow us to do things like differentiate more pure spectral colors from mixes of spectral colors.
This is probably correct, though outside of very particular situations with artificial light I can't imagine it making much of a difference. Natural EM emissions are virtually always broad-spectrum rather than single wavelength. Which is probably why we landed on trichromacy, evolutionarily. Big brains can do the heavy lifting of combining inputs but picking fruit out of foliage was important enough for color vision beyond many terrestrial animals. There's some cool stuff past the edges of our perception, like UV patterns on flowers or infrared snake-vision, but I think it's pretty safe to assume there's nothing hiding within the "visible light" spectrum. You already mentioned extra-spectral colors and those are pretty neat.
Where can I buy more cones for my eyes? I want 50.
We have a pretty good guess on the Earth's inner core, in case you're wondering. Getting an actual sample though, whew. I think it's easier to colonize a planet outside our solar system.
I could that see being done eventually, if we can get a permanent moonbase, nuclear fusion, developed asteroid mining and a few other things I could see it being done maybe next century. The inner core of the earth though, reaching close to 6000 degrees and insane pressure, all the while being surrounded by a liquid core producing our magnetic field.
The only reason I don't discount humans ever succeeding in doing that is because we already landed on the mfucking moon. That's pretty metal.
Have we ever probed the direct core of any...planet? star? not sure what to say, celestial body?
Thinking about the fact that we just yeeted someone onto the moon, blows my mind all the time. The very idea that we have people who are willing to go into the unknown like that is bonkers.
Nope, they're all waaaay far down because celestial bodies are 1) far away and 2) kinda big. I suppose we could try to drill into an asteroid fully at some point. If you mean more properly rounded bodies, the small, close one would probably be something like Ceres, a dwarf planet. Which still has a radius of nearly 500 km. I suppose Ceres may be possible if our current idea of internal structure is correct.
It'd be a herculean effort, would require at least some degree of settlements of Mars. Well, or whatever we'd make to drill to the core would have to be nearly autonomous. But the pressure at the core would be less than how deep we've dived with stuff below the Mariana Trench.
That wouldn't really make any sense because it takes almost as much energy to get from Mars to Ceres as from Earth to Ceres, but then we'd also have to move everything from Earth to Mars first. It would make more sense to assemble in orbit or on Ceres.
It's moreso that I mean a permanent settlement, with a society living on Mars. Essentially, the development of the project being done on Mars. Mars has a lower escape velocity than Earth which makes things easier. It would also make communication easier because(on average) the distance between Ceres and Mars is less than Ceres and Earth. Which, if something goes really wrong, is useful for emergencies. (Ofc there are periods when the opposite is true and the difference of Mars-Ceres will be far bigger than Earth-Ceres, but that's kind of why having two points would be useful)
Though, I suppose with technology that advanced it may actually be easier to produce the most within the asteroid belt, mined from asteroids. That becomes pretty hypothetical though, so I'm not sure if I can make a proper guess of it, but itd mean you'd be correct.
To add to the other answer, even though we haven't dug much below the surface of any celestial body we have learned a decent amount about the interior of the moon and Mars by studying seismic activity. This article covers one recent Mars mission to study the interior.
I still have the boarding pass for Insight. The Mars Missions are always an interesting read.
I'd be interested in stretching the boundaries of this question into prehistory. Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years but we only know about a tiny slice of that time. What was life like before language? Before permanent settlements?
I deeply want to know information before information permanence became a thing. I know this is not possible, for obvious reasons.
But still…
The origin of language is something I think about on a regular basis and would love to know how it came about.
I was thinking in the same direction as you - what languages did Neanderthals speak? Did they use phonemes that our voices can't make? Or did they sign? How distant were they from the languages spoken by the homo sapiens or denisovans they encountered? Did they have a common ancestor? Or did language develop independently more than once?
Most of these questions are impossible to answer without time travel, but we actually have some evidence that leads to decent theories on some of these.
So, most of our ability to make educated guesses about Neanderthal language comes from fossil evidence, and there appears to be some evidence that their throats and auditory capabilities were quite similar to those of Homo sapiens (which is good evidence that they were able to use spoken language), while their brain structure was probably still quite different.
I don't think it's likely they would use phonemes we couldn't produce -- one of the key evolutionary components of spoken language in humans is that the shape and flexibility of our vocal tract evolved in ways that give us way more control over sound than other apes. If Neanderthals had different enough vocal tracts from those we have today, it would likely result in them being unable to produce phonemes that we can, rather than the other way around.
This is tangential to this question and I don't think you're making any claims here, but I do want to take this opportunity to emphasize something for anyone here who isn't already aware: human sign languages are just as complex, both phonologically and in their syntax/semantics, as spoken languages. They are not simpler or easier. Spoken language has the advantage over it of leaving your hands free, but the wide variety of sign languages on earth are just as complex when studied by linguists as spoken languages are.
I definitely agree with you that it would be hella interesting to investigate early human language like this, though. Since we can only really study ancient language through reconstruction, even going much less far back would teach us so much. Back to an era like this where we have almost no data would be truly fascinating!
Don't know if it counts as historic, but there's a ton of internet mysteries that I'd just want confirmed if it was an intentional hoax or public prank. If not, then I'd actually prefer not to know why that media exists. Some weirder sites like 973-eht-namuh-973, grave_robbers_club and mortis.
Or off putting images captured on traffic and trail cams like the Japanese shadow person that came up in 2020.
And there's also a ton of other strangeness that I stumbled into which was instantly forgotten. Like the time a friend linked me to a chat for what felt like a cult. And the crap posted there got me off the internet for a few days. I'll still get shivers thinking about an image someone posted there.
So I've always been fascinated not just by what happened in history, but who did it first. The 'firsts' that shaped the course of civilization but are completely lost to time. I'd love to know who was the first human to do things like:
Say an actual word with symbolic meaning or the first name given and what it meant (if it even meant anything).
Use fire deliberately.
Create a tool on purpose, not by accident.
Domesticate a dog.
Realize you could plant seeds and grow food.
The list goes on and on, these are just some of the oldest things that I could think of so we'll never know who they were, or even where exactly these moments happened. But they were real, and they changed everything. To me, those are the most haunting and beautiful mysteries of all.
I also got some local ones that's extremely curious about, like how did Guanches even get to the Canary Islands? The native people of the islands, somehow reached the archipelago before recorded navigation. DNA now links them to Berber peoples, yet no one can explain how a pre-Roman North-African culture crossed 100 km of Atlantic and thrived in isolation, complete with mummification, star-aligned caves, and a whistling language.
And then there's San Borondón, the legendary “eighth island” of the Canaries. Sailors claimed to see it for centuries. It appeared on old maps but every time someone sailed toward it, it vanished into mist. Today, it's said that it might just be an optical illusion, a mirage caused by reflections of nearby islands on the sea or in the sky. But the legend still lingers, and people continue to watch the horizon, just in case.
You may be interested in reading The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity. It goes rather in depth with some of plants and tools in ways that differ from how were usually taught in school. It's my favorite book.
I'm not a big reader, but if I can find it in audiobook format, I'll give it a try!
I think about that a lot.
I’d really like to know who was the first person to slice a piece of bread and put cheese inside it.
I know it’s completely silly and irrelevant, but the truth is that historical “firsts” are based on what was recorded, not necessarily what actually happened first. A lot of so-called recorded firsts probably weren’t the real firsts at all—and that drives me crazy.
Right? Like, what where they thinking? was it an accident? did they even notice they were the first to do it?
Well, on a clear day, you can see Fuerteventura from Africa and the islands were reported to be uninhabited by the Greeks, so I don't think there's really that much of a mystery here. They knew where it was and they didn't go there before the Romans.
As far as I know, Guanches arrived around 1st - 2nd century B.C. and they lacked boats or the knowledge of how to navigate the sea.
But would they really need navigational knowledge to go somewhere they could see? It seems much more likely that they either had some boats or someone with boats put them there than that a whole society just got washed away and happened to float on over.
Well, that's the point, we don't know for sure. The most accepted theory is that someone put them there, I've even heard that they used to have navigational knowledge but they just stopped passing it down throught generations but nothing to back this up really. Then some people has mentioned they may have been banished to the islands, as punishment or to isolate rebellious tribes. The reality is that we don't know yet.
I just don't get why that's such a huge mystery though. The same thing goes for pretty much everyone everywhere. It's an island you can see from the mainland. I don't see how that's any crazier than the "mystery" of how people first got to Sicily.
Who was the first guy who tried dairy and what the hell was he thinking?
Probably someone desperate from thirst, guys daring each other and realizing it was actually kinda good, or just plain weirdos.
I wonder this with so many complex recipes though. Who figured out how to make bread and cake?? What crazy people managed to come up with and like hákarl!?
Fermented food makes more sense to me actually. Something is spoiled, but you're nearly dying from hunger, so you try it anyway.
...how much of our cuisine comes from an iterative process of people dying? Just the amount of fermented beans and cheese is something.
I don't think it's at all weird, milk was already obviously safe because all mammals make and consume it. It's full of fats and sugars and proteins and meant to be very palatable. We would have already been keeping livestock for meat or labor or wool and stealing a bit of milk for oneself while out watching the herd, especially during lean times... yeah it makes perfect sense to me.
That line of questioning is also very evidently coming from someone who has hever been starving for months. (I haven't either) Bury half your village because blight ruined the crop and then see if that half-rotten fish you found buried at the beach isn't a tiny bit tempting.
Lactase persistence is not a trait that's naturally present in all humans, though -- and it's necessary for adult humans to digest lactose, the main carbohydrate in milk. Even today, most adults worldwide do not produce the lactase necessary to digest milk properly as adults. Adults from ancient cultures without this adaptation who drank milk occasionally "when times were lean" would probably have the same biological response as modern folks who don't produce lactase -- they'd shit themselves.
For the necessary selective pressure to evolve lactase persistence (which happened independently multiple times in different geographic locations), the best current theory is that they switched to drinking a lot of milk as a main source of nutrients (as you say, it contains a lot of good stuff) and raising dedicated dairy animals, which resulted in selection for lactase persistence in those populations that persists in their descendants to this day. Reportedly drinking a lot of milk very consistently can help those with lactose intolerance develop gut flora that help them digest lactose better even in the modern day (though don't try this without a doctor!), so it's likely that a larger shift towards dairy culture took place relatively quickly, rather than humans just occasionally sampling milk from their existing livestock.
I thought you could kind of turn on and off lactose tolerance by consistently drinking or not drinking milk. I know you can lose it, but I thought you could turn it back on if you were very persistent...and shit a lot in the process.
I haven't heard of you being able to turn it off -- I remain able to digest lactose even if I go a relatively long time without milk! -- but it is true that lactose intolerance can be reduced or eliminated by putting yourself through an extended (very unpleasant) period of a lot of milk consumption. But I think that has to do with gut flora, it obviously doesn't directly alter your genes (and we've identified specific genes associated with lactase persistence, different ones in different regions where it arose). There are places with low rates of lactase persistence that still have dairy culture, though, so there is definitely some environmental side of things.
I've definitely heard of people who "permanently" lost it after not consuming dairy for a long time. Maybe you are especially good at digesting lactose, maybe you didn't go long enough without it, or maybe there was just more dairy in some of your foods than you realized.
I mean, lactase persistence is genetic, and I think I'm fairly par for the course on that front. I think someone who can "lose" it like that likely has something else going on that's interfering with their ability to produce lactase that's perhaps responsive to their environment. Or they're not lactase persistent at all and their body just acclimates to it through gut flora or some other means when they're consuming dairy.
This isn't really a “mystery” in that sense, but I would pay a lot for a real, genuine video recording of the K-Pg asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago. I wanna see every detail of the approach, atmospheric entry, the impact, and the aftermath. I wanna see it from every angle; from low orbit, from the air, from the ground near the impact site, from the ground far from the impact site, from the surface of the Moon, and perhaps even from the surface of the asteroid itself. I don't want a movie/CGI rendering with “scientific best guesses”. I want the real thing.
I think of the mysterious death of Elisa Lam sometimes. I don't think knowing the truth would really give me any comfort though.
Seems likely she just had a psychotic break potentially related to her bipolar disorder.
...
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'm not an expert in scent hound tracking, but it seems reasonable that there would be no scent outdoors on a room made of bricks, concrete, etc.
I think it's totally possible someone was behind it, but the circumstantial evidence points to it just being a tragic accident in the course of mental illness.
Just because you name dropped him, we're actually pretty sure about DB Cooper now, here's a good article on it.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a63009965/db-cooper-parachute-fbi/