15 Unsolved Mysteries That Cannot Be Explained

Today, we take a look at these 15 unsolved mysteries that cannot be explained. Unsolved mysteries have always intrigued people because they represent the unknown and the unexplained, which can be both fascinating and unsettling. Humans are naturally curious creatures, and we are always looking for answers to the questions that intrigue us.

The Palpa flat mountain, along with the Palpa Lines or Palpa geoglyphs, is a mysterious site located in the Palpa province of Peru. The designs are formed by the exposure of the lighter-colored soil underneath and can range in size from a few feet to over five hundred feet in length.

Archeologists Discover “Sistine Chapel of the Ancients” With Thousands of Ice Age Rock Paintings

One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest.

Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.

Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.

These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study.

The discovery was made on 2019, but has been kept secret until 2020 as it was filmed for a major Channel 4 series to be screened in December: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found. The documentary’s presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi, an archaeologist and explorer, told the Observer: “The new site is so new, they haven’t even given it a name yet.”

She spoke of the excitement of seeing “breathtaking” images that were created thousands of years ago.

The discovery was made by a British-Colombian team, funded by the European Research Council. Its leader is José Iriarte, professor of archaeology at Exeter University and a leading expert on the Amazon and pre-Columbian history.

He said: “When you’re there, your emotions flow … We’re talking about several tens of thousands of paintings. It’s going to take generations to record them … Every turn you do, it’s a new wall of paintings.

“We started seeing animals that are now extinct. The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you’re looking at a horse, for example. The ice-age horse had a wild, heavy face. It’s so detailed, we can even see the horse hair. It’s fascinating.”

The images include fish, turtles, lizards and birds, as well as people dancing and holding hands, among other scenes. One figure wears a mask resembling a bird with a beak.

The site is so remote that, after a two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, a team of archaeologists and film-makers trekked on foot for around four hours.

They somehow avoided the region’s most dangerous inhabitants. “Caimans are everywhere, and we did keep our wits about us with snakes,” Al-Shamahi said, recalling an enormous bushmaster – “the deadliest snake in the Americas with an 80% mortality rate” – that blocked their jungle path. They had been delayed getting back, and it was already pitch black.

They had no choice but to walk past it, knowing that, if they were attacked, there was little chance of getting to a hospital. “You’re in the middle of nowhere,” she said. But it was “100%” worth it to see the paintings, she added.

As the documentary notes, Colombia is a land torn apart after 50 years of civil war that raged between Farc guerrillas and the Colombian government, now with an uneasy truce in place. The territory where the paintings have been discovered was completely off limits until recently and still involves careful negotiation to enter safely.

Al-Shamahi said: “When we entered Farc territory, it was exactly as a few of us have been screaming about for a long time. Exploration is not over. Scientific discovery is not over but the big discoveries now are going to be found in places that are disputed or hostile.”

The paintings vary in size. There are numerous handprints and many of the images are on that scale, be they geometric shapes, animals or humans. Others are much larger.

Al-Shamahi was struck by how high up many of them are: “I’m 5ft 10in and I would be breaking my neck looking up. How were they scaling those walls?”

Some of the paintings are so high they can only be viewed with drones.

Iriarte believes that the answer lies in depictions of wooden towers among the paintings, including figures appearing to bungee jump from them.

He added: “These paintings have a reddish terracotta colour. We also found pieces of ochre that they scraped to make them.”

Speculating on whether the paintings had a sacred or other purpose, he said: “It’s interesting to see that many of these large animals appear surrounded by small men with their arms raised, almost worshipping these animals.”

Observing that the imagery includes trees and hallucinogenic plants, he added: “For Amazonian people, non-humans like animals and plants have souls, and they communicate and engage with people in cooperative or hostile ways through the rituals and shamanic practices that we see depicted in the rock art.”

Al-Shamahi added: “One of the most fascinating things was seeing ice age megafauna because that’s a marker of time. I don’t think people realise that the Amazon has shifted in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rainforest. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paintings, of course they weren’t going to live in a forest. They’re too big. Not only are they giving clues about when they were painted by some of the earliest people – that in itself is just mind-boggling – but they are also giving clues about what this very spot might have looked like: more savannah-like.”

Iriarte suspects that there are many more paintings to be found: “We’re just scratching the surface.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/n...

Man finds a family burial older than Egyptian pyramids while working in a garden

The unique discovery was made in May 2020 in the outskirts of Ulan-Ude, capital city of the mountainous Republic of Buryatia.

A resident of Ulan-Ude was working in the family garden with his son when they came across three skeletons - two adults and a child between them - buried in embryo positions metres away from their home.

‘I was digging a compost pit with my son, he was picking up stones and taking them away when suddenly a bone, a joint jumped out. I spent some time volunteering for searching squads in Kursk region (meaning that Alexey was helping to re-bury remains of the WWII soldiers, The Siberian Times), so I immediately understood that these were human remains.

'I carefully cleared top of the burial and saw the first adult’s skull first, then the child, then the second adult’, Alexey Agoshkov told a local TVcom TV channel.

His excited son Ivan said that he ran to report the find to his mother, who couldn’t believe that something as significant as an ancient burial could have been found in their garden.

Further archeological research established that the people were buried at least severn thousand years ago.

It’s not clear yet if the adults were a man and a woman; the cause of their death was not established yet.

No wounds suggesting that they could have died in a battle were found on the skeletons, said archeologist Natalia Tsydenova, researcher at the Institute of Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies.

A white stone ring was placed on top of one of the adults’ head before they were buried; the same person had bracelets made of shell on both wrists.

A fragment of a bone needle carrier was found on another adult skeleton along with three small plates of chalcedony by the hips.

Further research will establish gender of the people found in the burial, their age, racial identity and the cause of death.

The burial does look similar to Kitoy people, the early Neolithic culture of the North Angara region, though there are some differences from the traditional Kitoy graves, Natalia Tsydenova said.

Might this burial be a part of a bigger graveyard and belong to an ancient settlement?

Yes, and if so ‘it would be simply amazing’, said doctor of history Prokopy Konovalov who has been working at the site.

Source: https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/new...

The megalodon was one of the largest fish that ever lived

A Florida student figured out a way to more accurately measure the size of one of the largest fish that ever lived – the extinct megalodon shark – and found that it was even larger than previously estimated.

The megalodon (officially named Otodus megalodon, which means “Big Tooth”) lived between 3.6 and 23 million years ago and was thought to be about 34 feet long on average, reaching the maximum length of 60 feet. Now a new study puts that number at up to 65 feet (20 meters).

Homework assignment leads to a discovery

The study, published in Palaeontologia Electronica, used new equations extrapolated from the width of megalodon’s teeth to make the improved estimates. The paper’s lead author, Victor Perez, developed the revised methodology while he was a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History. He got the idea while teaching students, noticing a range of discrepancies in the results they were getting.

Students were supposed to calculate the size of megalodon based on the ancient fish’s similarities to the modern great white shark. They utilized the commonly accepted method of linking the height of a shark’s tooth to its total body length. As the press release from the Florida Museum of Natural History expounds, this method involves locating the anatomical position of a tooth in the shark’s jaw, measuring the tooth “from the tip of the crown to the line where root and crown meet,” and using that number in an appropriate equation.

But while carrying out calculations in this way, some of Perez’s students thought the shark would have been just 40 feet long, while others were calculating 148 feet. Teeth located toward the back of the mouth were yielding the largest estimates.

“I was going around, checking, like, did you use the wrong equation? Did you forget to convert your units?” said Perez, currently the assistant curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland. “But it very quickly became clear that it was not the students that had made the error. It was simply that the equations were not as accurate as we had predicted.”

The new approach

Perez’s math exercise demonstrated that the equations in use since 2002 were generating different size estimates for the same shark based on which tooth was being measured. Because megalodon teeth are most often found as standalone fossils, Perez focused on a nearly complete set of teeth donated by a fossil collector to design a new approach.

Perez also had help from Teddy Badaut, an avocational paleontologist in France, who suggested using tooth width instead of height, which would be proportional to the length of its body. Another collaborator on the revised method was Ronny Maik Leder, then a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum, who aided in the development of the new set of equations.

The research team analyzed the widths of fossil teeth that came from 11 individual sharks of five species, which included megalodon and modern great white sharks, and created a model that connects how wide a tooth was to the size of the jaw for each species.

“I was quite surprised that indeed no one had thought of this before,” shared Leder, who is now director of the Natural History Museum in Leipzig, Germany. “The simple beauty of this method must have been too obvious to be seen. Our model was much more stable than previous approaches. This collaboration was a wonderful example of why working with amateur and hobby paleontologists is so important.”

Why use teeth?

In general, almost nothing of the super-shark survived to this day, other than a few vertebrae and a large number of big teeth. The megalodon’s skeleton was made of lightweight cartilage that decomposed after death. But teeth, with enamel that preserves very well, are “probably the most structurally stable thing in living organisms,” Perez said. Considering that megalodons lost thousands of teeth during a lifetime, these are the best resources we have in trying to figure out information about these long-gone giants.

Researchers suggest megalodon’s large jaws were very thick, made for grabbing prey and breaking its bones, exerting a bite force of up to 108,500 to 182,200 newtons.

Limitations of the new model

While the new model is better than previous methods, it’s still far from perfect in precisely figuring out the sizes of animals which lived so long ago and left behind few if any full remains. Because individual sharks come in a variety of sizes, Perez warned that even their new estimates have an error range of about 10 feet when it comes to the largest animals.

Other ambiguities may affect the results, such as the width of the megalodon’s jaw and the size of the gaps between its teeth, neither of which are accurately known. “There’s still more that could be done, but that would probably require finding a complete skeleton at this point,” Perez pointed out.

How did the megalodon go extinct?

Environmental changes that led to fluctuations in sea levels and disturbed ecosystems in the oceans likely led to the demise of these enormous ancient sharks. They were just too big to be sustained by diminishing food resources, says the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research.

A 2018 study suggested that a supernova 2.6 million years ago hit Earth’s atmosphere with so much cosmic energy that it resulted in climate change. The cosmic rays that included particles called muons might have caused a mass extinction of giant ocean animals (“the megafauna”) that included the megalodon by causing mutations and cancer.

Scientists, led by Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, estimated that “the cancer rate would go up about 50 percent for something the size of a human — and the bigger you are, the worse it is. For an elephant or a whale, the radiation dose goes way up,” as he explained in a press release.

Source: https://bigthink.com/the-past/ancient-mega...

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7 'Out-Of-Place' Historical Artifacts Explained

Out-of-place Artifacts are any historical object that seems, at a glance, to go against our understanding of historical chronology. Some artifacts appear "too advanced" for the technology of the period they were created, and seem like they’ve fallen out of time.

The mystery of these artifacts has led to a range of wild speculation, involving everything from aliens to time travel. As much fun as it is to think someone with a flux-capacitor popped by and accidentally left a cell phone in ancient Rome, most of these objects have reasonable explanations within archeology and history.

But the real historical and archeological context behind these Out-of-place artifacts and the ancient cultures which produced them can be just as interesting as speculative theories. So, let’s take a look at seven of the most thought-provoking, and uncover how such astounding artifacts were created.

What It Was Like To Live In Ancient Rome During Its Golden Age

Ancient Rome was at its apex from the second century BC through the second century AD. During the Pax Romana of the first and second centuries AD, Rome benefited from the expansion of its empire, with vast amounts of wealth and diverse cultural influences flooding into its borders.

What was Ancient Rome like? It had a little bit of everything. The city of Rome was a bustling urban center full of commoners, animals, and politicians - all running into each other on crowded streets, in public buildings, and at any number of sporting events.

Life in Ancient Rome was full of excitement, with plenty of opportunities for entertainment and spectacle contributing to the cosmopolitan atmosphere.

The mystery of the ancient “stone-cutting machine” linking India and China

Mamallapuram is an ancient seaport town in Tamil Nadu. Also known as Mahabalipuram, this is a very interesting town located about 60 kilometers from Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Some of the top attractions of this place include some cultural monuments, temples and stone carvings. Due to the immense importance of this town from the ancient monumental, historic and cultural point of view, Mamallapuram has been declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

History dating back to the Pallavas

Mamallapuram, literally translated as the city of Mamalla got its name after the famed Pallava King Narasimhavarman-I. With Kancheepuram as their capital, the ancient Pallavas had some strategic trade connections with some South East Asian countries, especially China. We learn from historical evidence dating back to the 6th century that this town had been a very important sea port under the rule of the Pallavas.

Connections with China

  • During 6th and 7th centuries, Chinese pilgrims had been coming to Kancheepuram. One of the notable personalities who visited the Pallava Kingdom include Hiuen Chiang, the world traveler.

  • A disputed account says the much disputed legend of Bodhi Dharma who went to China around 527 AD and resided there for a long time was in fact a Pallava king. Bodhi Dharma is said to be the origin of martial arts. Eventually he embraced Buddhism and became the 28th patriarch of Buddhism following Prajnatara.

  • Some historical accounts say Pallavas had also sent their envoys to China. Vayalur inscriptions found near Mamallapuram make a mention about this.

  • A renowned archaeologist says, “Celadon ware (pottery) of the first and second Century recovered on the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu gives us a clue to Chinese maritime activities.” He says that such evidence shows us that the coastal areas of Mamallapuram had direct connections with China. Trade links of Mamallapuram with China are further attested by the fact that Chinese coins dating back to 2000 years ago were found in Tamil Nadu.

  • “Pattinapalai,” an ancient Tamil work attributed to the post Sangam period talks that a Chinese ship had been anchored on the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu.

  • History says Emperor Wei (circa 185-149 BCE) made a mention of refers to Kancheepuram as “Huang-Che”. Chinese kings had sent presents to the then ruler of Kancheepuram.

Mamallapuram Tourism

As on date, Mamallapuram does not attract many Chinese tourists. However, historians and academicians strongly believe the scene will change dramatically following the meeting between the two nation’s heads.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.in/thelife/cul...

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12 Most Mysterious Recent Archaeological Finds Scientists Still Can't Explain

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Historical Figures Recreated From Paintings Using Artificial Intelligence

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Ancient Necklace Unearthed In Woman’s Grave Could Rewrite Medieval History

A 1,300-Year-Old Gold Necklace Found in an Early Christian Burial in England Is a ‘Once-in-a-Lifetime Discovery,’ Says Archaeologist.

The archaeologists had discovered an early medieval grave—and while most of the skeleton had decomposed, an ornate 30-piece gold necklace remained. Dating to around 630 to 670 C.E. it was made up of Roman coins, gold, garnets, painted glass and semiprecious stones; a large cross pendant was at its center.

The Mystery of the Sphinx Temple! Evidence for Hidden Chambers, High Tech, and Secret Digs?

The Sphinx Temple has been closed to the public for decades, but within its walls are clues to its mysterious past. Buried for millennia, the temple’s modern excavation and connection to age-old stories of the Sphinx, it’s ‘pedestal,’ and hidden, subterranean chambers have led to a history of secretive expeditions and explorations in recent times. Behind the locked gates is also found compelling evidence for advanced technology, wrought in stone, and indications of mysterious, functional infrastructure possibly leading into unexplored shafts and chambers, in the bedrock below one of the most famous monuments in the world, the Great Sphinx of Giza.