If there is one thing that always ends up intriguing or captivating for us, it’s a good mystery. No matter where you live or what culture you are from, a mystery will always enthrall you. Human kind as a species has always striven to find answers through logic and science. Some have been solved over the years and in doing so lost their essence. However, there are still many of them looming over us. No amount of hard work and logical thought has been able to provide any concrete answers to their existence. Here are some of the greatest unsolvable mysteries of the world.
1) The Moai Statues of Easter Island
In 1722, a Dutch explorer discovered something very strange. He had set on a journey to find a land mass named Terra Australis which he believed to exist. What he did discover was an island unlike any he had ever seen or heard about before. What was surprising for him was not the fact that there were about 3000 people living in such an isolated island but the huge statues that greeted the sea travelers. The island which he later named as the Easter Island had nearly 887 giant statues, with some of them being nearly 33 feet tall and weighing about 82 tons.
What has baffled people all these years is not merely how the natives were able to make such giant statues but how they managed to transport them. The Rapa Nui people had somehow managed to move them all the way from their main quarry at Rano Raraku to stone platforms around the perimeter of the island.
Several tests have been made over the years involving ropes, sleds and even tracks but most of them resulted in heavy damage to the statues. To this day, it remains a mystery how people in an isolated island over 700 years ago managed to move these stone behemoths to where they stand today.
2) Gobekli Tepe
Another great mystery that has surprised people all over the world is that of Gobekli Tepe. Located in Turkey, the site consists of nearly 200 pillars, each standing 20 feet high and weighing about 20 tons arranged in 20 different circles. What has baffled people is that the Gobekli Tepe was built more than 13,000 years ago.
Before its discovery, it was believed that people of that age weren’t advanced enough to have complex social hierarchies and symbolic systems. Even the division of labor was thought to be a concept that was developed much later. But the existence of this site throws everything we thought we knew right out of the window.
Though the discovery sparked many debates, it only ended up with more questions. How were the nomadic, Neolithic humans able to organize their labor force to work on this site? Why did they build it?
3) Antikythera Mechanism
An ancient analogue computer was discovered in the year 1900 from a shipwreck near Greece. It was used to figure out the various positions of celestial bodies by utilizing a series of 37 bronze gears. What was so mysterious about it? Well, it was made somewhere between 150-100 BC, nearly a thousand years before we reinvented anything as complex as this device. The knowledge that created such technology at the age seemed to have been lost for over a thousand years. What else were the Ancient Greeks capable of? How much more knowledge was lost in antiquity?
4) The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich manuscript was bought by a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich in the year 1912. At first, the manuscript merely looked like a unique piece of strange literature. It had over 240 pages with illustrations and diagrams of elements of cosmology, astronomy, herbalism and biology. The subjects discussed in this manuscript were realized, but only by looking at the various drawings inside because it’s written in a language unknown to man. The writing was done smoothly as there was no evidence of hesitation or errors in the various pages and yet no one can explain what it means.
According to carbon dating, the manuscript was written somewhere between 1404 and 1438. In the 700 years that followed, there has not been any discovery of a language that even remotely resembles what is written in the Voynich Manuscript. Some speculate it’s a hoax but it hardly seems to make sense that such an elaborate hoax would be made that long ago. Moreover, the fluidity of the writing in the script seems to indicate that the author wrote it in a very natural manner without hesitation or doubts.
5) The Dancing Plague of 1518
Yes you read it right. The dancing plague of 1518 is something that has perplexed people ever since it occurred. It started in the streets of Strasbourg in the year 1518 when a woman was seen dancing wildly. As the day turned to night, she kept on dancing and as the next day began, she still kept on going. Within a single week, more than 30 people had joined her and they all were dancing as if they were possessed by an unknown entity. Within a month, more than 400 people had joined in against their will. As the days passed, many became exhausted and started dying but the rest seemed to be unaffected and kept on dancing.
Physicians then believed that the only way to make them stop was to allow them to get the dancing out of their systems. Stages were built for the remaining dancers and even musicians were brought in to play songs while they danced.
Several theories have been made since with some of them involving poisonous and psychoactive chemicals being involved. What was more surprising was that nearly seven other cases of people dancing randomly were observed in the same region in the medieval era. While it may sound like a bad fictional movie, the reality was that it was an incredibly dark event with some of the dancers even requesting others to punch or kick them to make them stop.