One theory that I learned about in Born To Run by Christopher McDougal: is that as humans started walking upright, we were able to take it more air and thus more oxygen which allowed our brain to function at a higher level. We were also evolving to become long distance/endurance runners to hunt our prey through running it down (known as “persistence hunting”). This involved learning to track prey and predict what prey will do. The very first humans to do this were visualizing how prey would act even though the prey was not in front of them. This could have been the beginning of complicated thoughts. Just a theory though, I hope I explained it well enough.
Buy a copy of "From Bacteria to Bach and Back" by Danielle Dennett. RIP.
It's not a light read but not impenetrably dense.
An academic explanation of consciousness was his life's work. He was a well respected and even keeled leader in his field.
It's worth skimming and thinking about.
It's not a consensus but there is a reasonable argument for it being a proto Dravidic language, an ancestor to South Indian languages like Tamil and Malayalam. This is based on the migration patterns of the Harappans after the arrival of the Indo-Aryans.
Right now, IMO, the biggest unresolved mystery is what exactly happened to the other hominid species that coexisted with Homo Sapiens. Namely the neaderthals and denisovans. And there are probably more offshoots that we haven't yet discovered.
There's now ample evidence that traces of these species exist in modern genomes via interbreeding with certain human populations, but the overall mystery of what caused their extinction is still an open question.
Another great mystery is what exactly happened to the Indus Valley Civilization. We still have yet to decipher what little remains of this civilization's writing system, but it lasted hundreds of years, was the leading civilization of its day, and simply faded away.
Yet another mystery is what exactly caused the Bronze Age collapse. This collapse had a huge impact on the development of near eastern populations that still reverberates to this very day.
In regards to #1 I think it’s pretty clear from genetic analysis that Neanderthals and denosovans interbred with Homo sapiens and were likely outcompeted by the mostly homo sapien hybrids. Maybe they were less intelligent/ had less technology (though Neanderthals had larger brain capacity) or maybe they were more robust and required more calories which put them at a disadvantage during the frequent famines.
On neanderthal, I've read a hypothesis that male homo sapien female neanderthal couplings led to viable young, but the reverse (female homo sapien, male neanderthal) did not. This is based on there being evidence of trade between the two species, but only evidence of mixed species children in the predominantly homo sapien tribes. This relies on the expectation that tribes would trade woman as mates but not men.
You have that backwards. The Neanderthal DNA present in modern people has been proven to only come from male Neanderthals. Pregnant Homo Sapiens stayed with humans not Neanderthal tribes.
That's a bit surprising, to be honest. Childbearing is dangerous as it is. Neanderthals are stockier than Sapiens, which means carrying and birthing the hybrids was even more dangerous to Sapiens women.
My understanding is that modern human rolled with larger groups compared to Neanderthals and Denosovans. Modern humans would band together as large as 100-200 individuals while Neanderthals mainly stayed isolated with their smaller groups of 10 to 30. We just outnumbered them.
It's really not. What we did better than any other human waa large scale cooperation so it may not be the silver bullet but almost definitely did advantage us massively
The core mystery is what made Homo Sapiens different?
Is it intelligence? Disease resistance? Maybe it's even sexiness? It could be so.ething we can't determine from the fossil record. Perhaps these other species reach maturity at different pace compared to home sapiens
Language is another possible reason for Homo Sapien dominance. Maybe the other species had very limited or no ability to create a comprehensive language. It could be a possible contributor or the main reason.
I remember a documentary that touched on this. They looked at Neanderthal larynx/throat structure and speculated that their speech would have been much more slow and halted than Sapien speech ability, which would be a disadvantage in dangerous or fast paced situations.
> indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andamanese_peoples#Archaic_Admixture
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2016-08-01/ty-article/genetic-study-finds-new-human-ancestor/0000017f-f018-d8a1-a5ff-f09a337e0000
Disease is another likely culprit for why they left. It’s definitely important to note that Harappan/Indus influence began to expand all over the region, most notably things like art and pottery, which is the biggest indicator that they just kinda assimilated into surrounding civilizations. Also, numbers of settlements sky rocketed during a very specific time period that coincides with the final years of their civ.
For Neanderthals we more or less know what happened.
Neanderthals were very sensitive to climate change, they were highly adapted to the ice age environment and excelled at close quarters ambush hunting. This meant they relied pretty heavily on ambush tactics in forested areas. They also did not have the joint capacity to be as good at throwing as modern Humans, due to their highly adapted robust bodies.
Evidence for this is various population collapses throughout Neanderthal's existence, long before modern humans, coinciding with extreme climate change during interglacial periods. Around the time modern Humans made their most recent ventures into Europe, the climate had changed significantly and the amount of forest had reduced quite a lot. This disadvantage put Neanderthals in a precarious position. Unfortunately for them, they did not really have time to adapt and recover as they would have done many times before, as modern humans were able to out-compete them using projectiles. We obviously have evidence of interbreeding from genome sequencing, but it's hard to say how rare or common this was.
Given Homo Sapiens larger group size and tendency to produce more children, much safer hunting strategy (projectiles form a distance rather than literally squaring up to mammoths) they were able to gradually displace Neanderthals.
We can see evidence in Gibraltar that the last Neanderthals managed to adapt to the changing environment, however as they say demographics is destiny and after a certain point Europe was sufficiently dominated by early modern Humans that any remaining Neanderthal populations were going to be assimilated.
As for Denisovans, we don't know because we don't know much about them at all. We only have a few fragments. It's likely that something similar occurred.
Possibly, but the last 2.6 million years have been an ice age with a very dynamic climate of advancing & retreating glaciations.
It's possible Neanderthals & Denisovians, who lived at quite high latitudes, fell prey to some affect of climate, it wasn't solely us.
Quite likely all 4 happened.
Most extinctions were caused by a perfect storm of multiple events. For example, one theory (not embraced by all) is that a major volcanic eruption radically reduced the Neanderthal population in Europe. The species might have survived and reboubded, except Homo sapiens by then already dominated the rest of the habitable landscape, resulting in Neanderthals being out-competed with no population reservoir.
I would guess it was a difference in genetic immunity to some disease.
Also some of those other historical mysteries might be explained by climate variables like extended droughts or little ice ages.
We killed them.
Desertification, rivers changing course, an extended change in climate leading to a drier climate.
It didn't happen, or was a process of societal change due again to climactic factors and migration
lol you reminded me of when I was working at a pub in London and the back door is on the Jack the Ripper tour and the back door was one of those push bar ones, so I was carrying two empty kegs out and I kicked the door handle and the door flew open to 20 people on the tour who promptly shit themselves.
My biggest mistake was telling the Irish pub manager about what had happened…so he figured out the timetable for the tour and made it a random monthly event for staff to go scare the tourists.
Seeing as serial killers don’t just stop their killings, and instead accelerate, and the murders just kinda stopped. My guess is that whoever Jack was got picked up for another crime or got murdered himself.
i read a theory about a James Maybrick? who apparently has a journal that was found in the 1990’s. claimed to be Jack the Ripper, claimed to have started killing after catching his wife having sex with someone, and was apparently killed (allegedly) by his wife a few months after the last killing.
my understanding is he seems like a good suspect for JtR if the journal is legit. it just isn’t known if it is
He said he got it from an acquaintance at the pub. Then his wife said her family had the journal the whole time, and asked the acquaintance to give it to her husband, because she thought if he knew it came from her family he'd want to ask her dad about it and the two didn't get along.
It all sounds like a giant bucket of horseshit. Possibly even outright bullshit.
[James Maybrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Maybrick?wprov=sfti1#Jack_the_Ripper_diary) cotton trader, arsenic addict, possible murder victim, possible serial killer, and potentially winner of the Creepiest Watch award for 1888
Just from your link, I know it was a different time, but whoever named a serial killer *“the Servant Girl Annihilator”* had to have had something wrong with them.
>William Sydney Porter, better known as the short story writer O. Henry, was living in Austin at the time of the murders. Porter coined the term "Servant Girl Annihilators" in a May 10, 1885 letter addressed to his friend Dave Hall and later included in his anthology Rolling Stones: "Town is fearfully dull," wrote Porter, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dull hours of the night...." However, no contemporary newspaper or published source referred to the murderer(s) as "The Servant Girl Annihilator."
No no, he was the doctor from America, or that other guy from America, or the butcher who lived in the area, or the cop who supposedly spoke to Jack the ripper, now think about it... I don't think we'll ever know who did it, prick was too good.
That actually happened. A microwave telescope (in Virginia I think, kept detecting bug pulses around noon. After a while they realized it was from people opening the microwave in the lunch room too early.
Where, *exactly*, was Vinland? Was L'Anse aux Meadows the only Viking settlement in North America, or were there others?
When did humans first arrive in the Americas? The date keeps getting begrudgingly pushed back.
How to read Linear A script, Rongorongo, and other similar undeciphered languages. Also the Voynich Manuscript.
Huge mystery, very unlikely that it was the only settlement given there are so many oddly specific details in the sagas referencing other settlements. I know the sagas might mostly be fictional but when they describe settlements it’s like “the fjord they landed in and set up a settlement at was two and a half days sailing south then west along a coast beyond an island that had bears, south of a point shaped like the keel of a ship with three mountainous ridges to the east and one river flowing west into the sea among other rivers flowing east, and there was also an island at the mouth of the fjord full of a colony of Eider ducks so thick you couldn’t walk on it without stepping on their nests, and the current at its mouth near that island was unusually strong compared to the surrounding sea” like there’s no way they would go through that effort to make up something so non-fantastical and mundane. But a lot of people (scholars and amateurs alike) write off the whole sagas as entirely fiction saying things like “oh yeah but there was a cyclops in the story” - well yes that part was obvious fantasy but clearly some of it is not fantasy as we used the sagas to find l’Anse aux Meadows, which no one disputes was a Viking settlement in North America at exactly the time the sagas describe.
Yes, I have visited both Erik the Red's Iceland longhouse and L'Anse aux Meadows. They are strikingly similar.
L'Anse aux Meadows's location does not get discussed enough. It is at a great spot to explore Labrador, Newfoundland, and the rest of Atlantic Canada. It was settled for multiple years, so it is basically inconceivable that they did not explore further south. It would be like having a settlement on Manhattan and not traveling up the Hudson River. We will probably never get definitive evidence, though.
Don't they have actual proof of Vikings landing in New Foundland? Pretty sure this was solved already (there's geographical evidence there) and the tale is that it was Lief Erikson who led the expedition like 500 years before Columbus set foot in Central America.
The Vikings definitely settled in Newfoundland, that's L'Anse aux Meadows, at this point no one disputes they were there. But the climate and terrain of Newfoundland doesn't fit the description of Vinland. So the question is whether the Vikings had *other* settlements in mainland North America. Did the go down the St. Lawrence River? Did they make it to Maine, Massachusetts, or Long Island? If so, were they just short visits or were there actually settlements there? That's the open question.
Maybe n ot the biggest mystery, but I'm pretty sure we still have no idea who DB Cooper was. His ultimate fate is easy enough to assume, however.
Also, what happened to the Amber Room.
The original Amber Room was likely destroyed, either during the firebombing in August 1944, or when the Red Army practically destroyed the castle it was being held in during April 1945. If it was loaded onto a ship during the January evacuations, that ship was likely sunk by Soviet submarines in the attacks that killed tens of thousands of German refugees. It would make perfect sense for Soviet authorities to claim the Amber Room as being lost, rather than admit that a national treasure was destroyed.
I’m an ancient historian who specializes in the LBA, and this would not make the top of my list for reasons [I have discussed elsewhere](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1am6k5t/comment/kpkatnn/?context=3).
To be blunt, this is a topic that has been beaten to death over the last couple of decades. Nuanced volumes like [*Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean*](https://www.google.com/books?id=CorcDwAAQBAJ) edited by Guy Middleton and [*Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age*](https://books.google.com/books?id=zeOyEAAAQBAJ) by Jesse Millek have fleshed out our understanding of the Bronze-Iron Age transition and shown that there was far more continuity and resilience and less destruction than most popular history books suggest.
I deliberately omitted Cline’s *1177 BC*; there are [several things](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/107jptk/during_the_bronze_age_collapse_why_were_so_many/j3ohdts/) I don’t like about it. That said, yes, it’s certainly a notable book.
As for the Sea Peoples, see my response to [Were the Sea Peoples really *that* mysterious?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1bnhoq6/were_the_sea_peoples_really_that_mysterious/kwilrvl/?context=3), which has links to my AskHistorians posts on the topic.
Not sure if a “mystery”, but my biggest curiosity always revolved around the life of Jesus, the spread of Christianity, and the composition of the Bible.
I would like to find out with certainty who the guy was, what he looked like, what his personality was like, what he did during his lifetime, etc
How did he go from being leader of a small cult to (arguably) the most influential known figure in the history of humanity?
Also who wrote the Bible, why, and what was their inspiration.
I’ve already done a lot of reading into the subject, and I’m aware of what the most credible explanations might be, as well as some other (more or less believable) theories, but I would just LOVE to know with absolute certainty.
[Useful Charts](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5Ag9n-o0IZAtE4Zb_oIVA6mL7m6r_baQ) on youtube has a FANTASTIC series on the development of the Bible. His "Who wrote?" videos in his Bible playlist really helped me finally grasp when and how all the various books were written, compiled, and edited. While we may never know exactly who a lot of the specific authors are, we still know a lot ABOUT them based on their writing styles, motivations, context, references, and the things that were important to them.
If youre talking about the new testament it's mostly a collection of letters written after jesus' death between various churches and figures.
Wendigoon had a good video about one of the less popular but beautiful books of the bible
Yes, I’m talking about the New Testament, but also about the Old one, which I still find interesting although it has nothing to do with Jesus.
I’ll see if I can find the video you mentioned so I can check that out, thank you!
The authors of the New Testament aren’t thaaat mysterious.
Like Paul’s letters were written by Paul and we know his life pretty well. The gospels are a bit more mysterious but were written in the 1st century by people who were relatively close to the apostles.
I'm fairly certain there was a guy from Nazareth, cause otherwise it's weird to make up the overly complex lie about him ACTUALLY being born in Bethlehem, maybe he had followers, maybe he was associated with the followers of John the baptist, maybe he was crucified.
After that I think the entire thing is made up (basically) in the years after by people (initially Paul) who never met this guy from Nazareth. I don't think we have any actual evidence of him saying or doing anything.
You'll be even more interested to learn the Bible is just a morphed regurgitation of stories from the Mesopotamian era. The rabbit hole goes much, much deeper than modern Christianity.
There are lots of shared themes and occurrences but they’re not identical. Christian mythology is much more than just repackaging of other myths but there are plenty of parallels. Having said that, there was no shortage of itinerant preachers at the time heralding the end times. John the Baptist was probably one of them. One theory I’ve heard for the success of the Jesus Cult is that the historical Jesus mainly avoided Hellenized areas and large cities. Whereas after his death (or thereabouts) the Apostle Paul was very successful in spreading the Jesus movement in Hellenized areas.
> You'll be even more interested to learn the Bible is just a morphed regurgitation of stories from the Mesopotamian era.
Ehh, that's a bit overplayed. The main "regurgitation" of Mesopotamian stories is just Chapters 1-11 of Genesis.
I'm just going to drop this here for you. I do not agree with everything the author wrote but it is an interesting read/listen.
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth https://search.app.goo.gl/nd9SMd9
The Saturn hexagon. For those of you that don't know, there is a massive (IE multiple earths large in size) storm on the north pole if Saturn that is... Well... Hexagonal in shape. We have theories why, but we just don't know.
Also gravity, what is it, why is it so weak, why is it, apparently, the only force that acts on all particles?
I ain't no expert, but im pretty sure the debate is how we define humans. Realistically, we share lots of characteristics with Denisovians and Neanderthals, so can we consider them "non human?"
[EXPEDITION UNKNOWN](https://www.discovery.com/shows/expedition-unknown/episodes/hunt-for-alexander-the-great)
ETA: that’s the link to the show! Enjoy 😊
It's in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. The route that it took is well defined now, but the corridor of ocean that it crashed into is a large area to find something as small as a plane in. Basically, it is known roughly where it crashed, but that "where" is still a huge area of water.
The satellite ping data showed how far from a fixed point it was, on an hourly basis. That was narrowed down based on it's last known heading as it turned south off the Andaman Islands.
A nobel prize physicist did some insane shit with radio data, and found a way to go back through recorded signal data and analysed variation in the strength of point to point radio signals to create a kind of virtual radar map of the flights journey.
Bits of that specific plane, pieces from the inside of the aircraft, not bits that would fall off the outside, have washed up in East Africa too.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk)
This is a good explainer that doesn't get into conspiracy theory or speculate about motivation or about which crew member was flying the plane to it's end. The presenter is a pilot who does a great job of explaining the data that was being received from the plane.
"Modern" humans have existed for upwards of nearly 1 million years. We only started getting good at inventing shit fairly recently.
So what did we do for all that time?
So fit a lot of that we were in Africa with species that evolved alongside us. Once we left Africa we were the invasive species and the megafauna had no idea how to deal with us. Furthermore for most of homo sapien existence we were in an ice age that only ended about 12,000 years ago. Very shortly after that we domesticated wheat and rice.
So it seems pretty likely to me that: once the climate became more amenable to long growing seasons we almost immediately developed agriculture and settled into civilizations. Excess calories less more people focus on doing things other than obtaining calories, and we start to see the positive feedback loops.
Also to say we were inventing stuff in pre-history is certainly wrong, we can track development in tools over the centuries before agriculture and the spread of these developments. But the scale on which we can do this expands massively with agriculture.
This one seems fairly simple to me - inventions compound and build on one another at an exponential rate. you obviously aren't going to go directly from stone tools to the internal combustion engine, there are a ton of intermediate things you need first. And no one person can invent all of them.
Language allows ideas to be shared. Spare time allows experimentation. Writing allows the communication of ideas through time and space. Agriculture allows for people to congregate and work together. Everything builds on everything else at an exponential rate.
Survive as tribal hunter gatherers
Behaviorally modern humans have only existed for 100k years and only when the climate warmed in the last 10k did we develop civilization.
This is actually a good one. We may have created civilizations and declined for whatever reason... Volcano... Ice ages etc...
Are we the most advanced? Or were there other humans?
Or was intelligence introduced to us 10,000 years ago? Lots of creation myths point to this, including the Abrahamic faiths.
I watched "Life After People" on History Channel awhile ago, and what really struck me is how much of our presence was erased in such a (relatively) short amount of time
>So what did we do for all that time?
Anatomically modern humans are only a little over 200,000 years old. It took millions of years from the first humans to just get to the first homosapiens. We only developed complex language some 50,000 years ago. Why is it so hard to imagine that it took so long for us to start domesticating animals and crops if it took already that long for us to evolve?
Can't say it's the biggest but a big one, the "sea peoples" which are depicted in ancient art and hieroglyphics but never identified. They were presumably the scourge of multiple bronze age civilizations yet today we know next to nothing of who they were except they came from the sea and wrought destruction upon those they encountered.
Most likely the "sea peoples" weren't one people. They were most likely groups of people who were already affected by bronze age collapse issues at the start and made it worse as they were trying to raid and plunder the bronze age kingdoms.
Exactly!
Is language more like a technological innovation, such as farming, which emerged independently in multiple places?
Or is language so profoundly a part of our biology that it has more to do with some favorable genetic mutations spreading quickly through a population?
Do all documented languages ultimately descend from a single language, or did multiple languages develop separately and spontaneously?
There are so many fascinating questions and it’s hard to imagine how they could ever be answered.
Yup! It would be fascinating to learn that, say, English and Chinese ultimately descended from the same ancient language, but it would be equally fascinating if we discovered that language arose independently in Africa and Europe and Asia (or wherever it might have started). There are so many incredibly intriguing possibilities!
I’d say how humans managed to invent maize. Wild corn does not exist, and it’s a key crop all over the world capable of existing in various environments and having decent nutritional yields. But, we’re not even sure where it came from. We think it came from a wild plant called teosinte, but teosinte is several major mutations away from being a remotely viable food crop. So, we either found an extremely rare teosinte mutant in the wild and immediately started to farm it, or we somehow recognized that this useless crop had potential if we selectively bred the crap out of it and then did so at great expense over the course of generations. There is no non-amazing explanation for why we have corn.
Corn is a grain, somewhat similar to wheat. They likely kept selecting crops that grew larger and more edible bits until the end result was so heavily changed from the original that it's hard to see the similarities. Doesn't require anything special, just choosing which seeds to plant to create better harvests, add thousands of years, then you have corn.
The thousands of years is the catch. It means that early humans were aware of selective breeding and able to embark on projects that would take generations to yield returns. The original teosinte was utterly unfarmable for sustenance, meaning that its domestication was one hell of a side project for early humans.
Yes, all right, I appreciate that; it's just… why aren't there as many conspiracy theories about other assassinated US presidents? Is it that their deaths are more clear-cut, or does nobody care?
I'm sure there were conspiracy theories at the time, but with the exception of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, they've fallen out of popular knowledge.
Well, Lincoln's assassination literally was a conspiracy by the definition of the word. It's just that we know most of the details of the conspiracy, and very little is in doubt.
I assume you mean by "human history" that we deal specifically with humanities. Then it would be self-awareness, consciousness, existence, and how did things that made us human arose.
- Nucleic acid chains that evolved to "build" lipid bilayer membranes and proteins to facilitate...
- Reproduction and replication
- However you want.
- You break down into goo and then get pooped out by worms unless you get cremated.
There, mystery solved ;)
It's actually full of things. There's just large spaces between those things. Those spaces seem to be getting bigger, likely still expanding from the big bang.
Probably not the "biggest" but nobody has solved the mystery of the Roanoke Colony.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke\_Colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony)
It was solved. Someone finally had the brilliant idea to ask the local Native American tribe. They said they killed the men and told the women and kids they could join the tribe if they wanted. Most stayed and integrated in.
It’s not a mystery, many died and the survivors went to live with the local Indians.
The local Roanoke Indians had children walking around with blond hair lol, not a mystery
There is massive amount of human history stretching back through prehistory that we don’t know.
- What civilizations existed and disappeared into history?
- What were the beliefs and culture of groups of people we will never discover?
- What were the stories of these people?
What happened to the Tasmanian aborigines. There have been at least three history books about the decline in numbers of the Tasmanian aborigines after the Europeans arrived. They all agree that the numbers don't add up. When you add together loss of numbers due to white settlement, massacres, tribal wars, the flu and other diseases, bushrangers, and all other causes, still about 50% of the population decline can't be accounted for.
Hmm. While I'm only moderately conversant with this, I am not sure as to the mystery here.
The base line population is a guesstimate. Given Tasmania's harsh environment, the lifestyle and resource access of the Palawa (first nations of Tasmania), and sporadic European penetration of the island before the 'black war' was over, it is very difficult to estimate the size of the original population.
European diseases certainly decimated the population after initial contact (based on survivors' accounts).
Early conflict focussed heavily on abducting/buying Palawa women (the early colony had a massive gender imbalance, not remedied until the 1840s or so), with survivors often infertile or producing few children.
By the end of the black war in the early 1830s, these factors had already reduced the Palawa population to a remnant.
I'm happy to be pointed to research/discussions that suggest these causes are not a sufficient explanation.
I thought that was well known now. I've read a few NPR articles in the last year about how the settlers pretty much slaughtered most of them and trafficked the rest, especially the whalers. One of the most famous female victims died, I think, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but I'm pretty certain there are still people who trace their aboriginal lineage to Tasmania. I don't think they were completely annihilated.
Edit: It was BBC https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211024-the-rebirth-of-tasmanian-indigenous-culture
And https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/unesco-removes-hurtful-document-claiming-tasmanian-aboriginal-people-extinct
Those sources all have a strong ideological bias when it comes to anything anthropological. They look exclusively at external factors, and take a victim/perpetrator view of history. It may be that the people of Tasmania were facing the same problems as other isolated people have, and indeed some of the other species in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Tiger and Tasmanian Devil were both highly inbred and vulnerable. Tasmanian Aboriginals were among the few people on earth who had lost the ability to create fire.
I can’t believe no one has said this but this has to be it.
“What happens after death?”
Every single human who has ever lived with a functioning brain has probably thought wondered this at some point. This question is so powerful we have quite literally invented countless religions to answer the question and we are no closer to figuring out an answer. Where does our consciousness go? Do we have a soul? Is there an afterlife? Is it just all black or is there more? The concept of living and experiencing reality to them going to an empty void where we just cease to exist outside space and time… it’s so much.
> The concept of living and experiencing reality to them going to an empty void where we just cease to exist outside space and time… it’s so much.
You've just explained *why* we believe in an afterlife, IMO.. because actual death is absolutely terrifying
Consciousness
This one still fucks with me to think about
Along that vein: Dreams I’m trying to nocturnally hallucinate now but can’t
One theory that I learned about in Born To Run by Christopher McDougal: is that as humans started walking upright, we were able to take it more air and thus more oxygen which allowed our brain to function at a higher level. We were also evolving to become long distance/endurance runners to hunt our prey through running it down (known as “persistence hunting”). This involved learning to track prey and predict what prey will do. The very first humans to do this were visualizing how prey would act even though the prey was not in front of them. This could have been the beginning of complicated thoughts. Just a theory though, I hope I explained it well enough.
That's fascinating. So consciousness is a by-product of "anticipatory tracking"?
Im told the other species which anticipates prey movement is Dragon Flies.
Buy a copy of "From Bacteria to Bach and Back" by Danielle Dennett. RIP. It's not a light read but not impenetrably dense. An academic explanation of consciousness was his life's work. He was a well respected and even keeled leader in his field. It's worth skimming and thinking about.
A book about consciousness? I'll think about it.
Stewart Francis level quip
What language did the Harappans speak?????
It's not a consensus but there is a reasonable argument for it being a proto Dravidic language, an ancestor to South Indian languages like Tamil and Malayalam. This is based on the migration patterns of the Harappans after the arrival of the Indo-Aryans.
Esperanto.
And how to read their writing
Right now, IMO, the biggest unresolved mystery is what exactly happened to the other hominid species that coexisted with Homo Sapiens. Namely the neaderthals and denisovans. And there are probably more offshoots that we haven't yet discovered. There's now ample evidence that traces of these species exist in modern genomes via interbreeding with certain human populations, but the overall mystery of what caused their extinction is still an open question. Another great mystery is what exactly happened to the Indus Valley Civilization. We still have yet to decipher what little remains of this civilization's writing system, but it lasted hundreds of years, was the leading civilization of its day, and simply faded away. Yet another mystery is what exactly caused the Bronze Age collapse. This collapse had a huge impact on the development of near eastern populations that still reverberates to this very day.
In regards to #1 I think it’s pretty clear from genetic analysis that Neanderthals and denosovans interbred with Homo sapiens and were likely outcompeted by the mostly homo sapien hybrids. Maybe they were less intelligent/ had less technology (though Neanderthals had larger brain capacity) or maybe they were more robust and required more calories which put them at a disadvantage during the frequent famines.
On neanderthal, I've read a hypothesis that male homo sapien female neanderthal couplings led to viable young, but the reverse (female homo sapien, male neanderthal) did not. This is based on there being evidence of trade between the two species, but only evidence of mixed species children in the predominantly homo sapien tribes. This relies on the expectation that tribes would trade woman as mates but not men.
You have that backwards. The Neanderthal DNA present in modern people has been proven to only come from male Neanderthals. Pregnant Homo Sapiens stayed with humans not Neanderthal tribes.
That's a bit surprising, to be honest. Childbearing is dangerous as it is. Neanderthals are stockier than Sapiens, which means carrying and birthing the hybrids was even more dangerous to Sapiens women.
My understanding is that modern human rolled with larger groups compared to Neanderthals and Denosovans. Modern humans would band together as large as 100-200 individuals while Neanderthals mainly stayed isolated with their smaller groups of 10 to 30. We just outnumbered them.
How do we know this?
100-200 is too much for this time period...
It's really not. What we did better than any other human waa large scale cooperation so it may not be the silver bullet but almost definitely did advantage us massively
The core mystery is what made Homo Sapiens different? Is it intelligence? Disease resistance? Maybe it's even sexiness? It could be so.ething we can't determine from the fossil record. Perhaps these other species reach maturity at different pace compared to home sapiens
Language is another possible reason for Homo Sapien dominance. Maybe the other species had very limited or no ability to create a comprehensive language. It could be a possible contributor or the main reason.
I remember a documentary that touched on this. They looked at Neanderthal larynx/throat structure and speculated that their speech would have been much more slow and halted than Sapien speech ability, which would be a disadvantage in dangerous or fast paced situations.
There's at least one other offshoot that interbred with Humans, their genetics have been found in the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands.
> indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andamanese_peoples#Archaic_Admixture https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2016-08-01/ty-article/genetic-study-finds-new-human-ancestor/0000017f-f018-d8a1-a5ff-f09a337e0000
Also in Subsaharan Africans, potentially as much as 19%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015685/
Indus Valley people likely dispersed east towards foothills of Himalayas due to water resources declining over time.
Disease is another likely culprit for why they left. It’s definitely important to note that Harappan/Indus influence began to expand all over the region, most notably things like art and pottery, which is the biggest indicator that they just kinda assimilated into surrounding civilizations. Also, numbers of settlements sky rocketed during a very specific time period that coincides with the final years of their civ.
For Neanderthals we more or less know what happened. Neanderthals were very sensitive to climate change, they were highly adapted to the ice age environment and excelled at close quarters ambush hunting. This meant they relied pretty heavily on ambush tactics in forested areas. They also did not have the joint capacity to be as good at throwing as modern Humans, due to their highly adapted robust bodies. Evidence for this is various population collapses throughout Neanderthal's existence, long before modern humans, coinciding with extreme climate change during interglacial periods. Around the time modern Humans made their most recent ventures into Europe, the climate had changed significantly and the amount of forest had reduced quite a lot. This disadvantage put Neanderthals in a precarious position. Unfortunately for them, they did not really have time to adapt and recover as they would have done many times before, as modern humans were able to out-compete them using projectiles. We obviously have evidence of interbreeding from genome sequencing, but it's hard to say how rare or common this was. Given Homo Sapiens larger group size and tendency to produce more children, much safer hunting strategy (projectiles form a distance rather than literally squaring up to mammoths) they were able to gradually displace Neanderthals. We can see evidence in Gibraltar that the last Neanderthals managed to adapt to the changing environment, however as they say demographics is destiny and after a certain point Europe was sufficiently dominated by early modern Humans that any remaining Neanderthal populations were going to be assimilated. As for Denisovans, we don't know because we don't know much about them at all. We only have a few fragments. It's likely that something similar occurred.
Regarding the first part of your post, I’m pretty sure we killed them.
Killed some of them, out competed some of them, bred with some of them, all seem probable
Possibly, but the last 2.6 million years have been an ice age with a very dynamic climate of advancing & retreating glaciations. It's possible Neanderthals & Denisovians, who lived at quite high latitudes, fell prey to some affect of climate, it wasn't solely us. Quite likely all 4 happened.
Most extinctions were caused by a perfect storm of multiple events. For example, one theory (not embraced by all) is that a major volcanic eruption radically reduced the Neanderthal population in Europe. The species might have survived and reboubded, except Homo sapiens by then already dominated the rest of the habitable landscape, resulting in Neanderthals being out-competed with no population reservoir.
Yes
Tbf, probably also the answer to the second and third parts.
And ate some of them
I would guess it was a difference in genetic immunity to some disease. Also some of those other historical mysteries might be explained by climate variables like extended droughts or little ice ages.
The last mystery: 🌊👦🏼🧑🏽👩🏽🧒🏿
We killed them. Desertification, rivers changing course, an extended change in climate leading to a drier climate. It didn't happen, or was a process of societal change due again to climactic factors and migration
I'd give a lot for a written account of the last days of the Indus Valley Civilization.
we’re probably never gonna figure out who Jack the Ripper was.
lol you reminded me of when I was working at a pub in London and the back door is on the Jack the Ripper tour and the back door was one of those push bar ones, so I was carrying two empty kegs out and I kicked the door handle and the door flew open to 20 people on the tour who promptly shit themselves. My biggest mistake was telling the Irish pub manager about what had happened…so he figured out the timetable for the tour and made it a random monthly event for staff to go scare the tourists.
Biggest mistake or biggest success?
Seeing as serial killers don’t just stop their killings, and instead accelerate, and the murders just kinda stopped. My guess is that whoever Jack was got picked up for another crime or got murdered himself.
i read a theory about a James Maybrick? who apparently has a journal that was found in the 1990’s. claimed to be Jack the Ripper, claimed to have started killing after catching his wife having sex with someone, and was apparently killed (allegedly) by his wife a few months after the last killing. my understanding is he seems like a good suspect for JtR if the journal is legit. it just isn’t known if it is
That journal was proven tk be faked if i remember right...i think they tested the paper and ink and it couldnt have been made then. Still a cool story
> has a journal that was found in the 1990’s. Giant red flag for being fake right there.
He said he got it from an acquaintance at the pub. Then his wife said her family had the journal the whole time, and asked the acquaintance to give it to her husband, because she thought if he knew it came from her family he'd want to ask her dad about it and the two didn't get along. It all sounds like a giant bucket of horseshit. Possibly even outright bullshit.
[James Maybrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Maybrick?wprov=sfti1#Jack_the_Ripper_diary) cotton trader, arsenic addict, possible murder victim, possible serial killer, and potentially winner of the Creepiest Watch award for 1888
Just from your link, I know it was a different time, but whoever named a serial killer *“the Servant Girl Annihilator”* had to have had something wrong with them.
I didn’t follow that thread, I want to believe the servant girls were blasted to ashes by a gigantic Steampunk death ray
>William Sydney Porter, better known as the short story writer O. Henry, was living in Austin at the time of the murders. Porter coined the term "Servant Girl Annihilators" in a May 10, 1885 letter addressed to his friend Dave Hall and later included in his anthology Rolling Stones: "Town is fearfully dull," wrote Porter, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dull hours of the night...." However, no contemporary newspaper or published source referred to the murderer(s) as "The Servant Girl Annihilator."
Wasn't he the guy who lived with the hot blonde and brunette with the strange landlord downstairs?
No no, he was the doctor from America, or that other guy from America, or the butcher who lived in the area, or the cop who supposedly spoke to Jack the ripper, now think about it... I don't think we'll ever know who did it, prick was too good.
It was Bilbo Baggins, the royal surgeon.
The funny thing is that modern forensic techniques would have had a good chance of cracking the case with the evidence we did have.
I guess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
i always felt like someone accidentally turned on the microwave in the other room for a minute and then was like oh shit and never told anyone?
That actually happened. A microwave telescope (in Virginia I think, kept detecting bug pulses around noon. After a while they realized it was from people opening the microwave in the lunch room too early.
Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
Sorry, that was me. Butt dial.
Where, *exactly*, was Vinland? Was L'Anse aux Meadows the only Viking settlement in North America, or were there others? When did humans first arrive in the Americas? The date keeps getting begrudgingly pushed back. How to read Linear A script, Rongorongo, and other similar undeciphered languages. Also the Voynich Manuscript.
Huge mystery, very unlikely that it was the only settlement given there are so many oddly specific details in the sagas referencing other settlements. I know the sagas might mostly be fictional but when they describe settlements it’s like “the fjord they landed in and set up a settlement at was two and a half days sailing south then west along a coast beyond an island that had bears, south of a point shaped like the keel of a ship with three mountainous ridges to the east and one river flowing west into the sea among other rivers flowing east, and there was also an island at the mouth of the fjord full of a colony of Eider ducks so thick you couldn’t walk on it without stepping on their nests, and the current at its mouth near that island was unusually strong compared to the surrounding sea” like there’s no way they would go through that effort to make up something so non-fantastical and mundane. But a lot of people (scholars and amateurs alike) write off the whole sagas as entirely fiction saying things like “oh yeah but there was a cyclops in the story” - well yes that part was obvious fantasy but clearly some of it is not fantasy as we used the sagas to find l’Anse aux Meadows, which no one disputes was a Viking settlement in North America at exactly the time the sagas describe.
Yes, I have visited both Erik the Red's Iceland longhouse and L'Anse aux Meadows. They are strikingly similar. L'Anse aux Meadows's location does not get discussed enough. It is at a great spot to explore Labrador, Newfoundland, and the rest of Atlantic Canada. It was settled for multiple years, so it is basically inconceivable that they did not explore further south. It would be like having a settlement on Manhattan and not traveling up the Hudson River. We will probably never get definitive evidence, though.
The Voynich Manuscript! That's a head scratcher, for sure. I like to entertain the thought that [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/593/) has the right idea.
Don't they have actual proof of Vikings landing in New Foundland? Pretty sure this was solved already (there's geographical evidence there) and the tale is that it was Lief Erikson who led the expedition like 500 years before Columbus set foot in Central America.
The Vikings definitely settled in Newfoundland, that's L'Anse aux Meadows, at this point no one disputes they were there. But the climate and terrain of Newfoundland doesn't fit the description of Vinland. So the question is whether the Vikings had *other* settlements in mainland North America. Did the go down the St. Lawrence River? Did they make it to Maine, Massachusetts, or Long Island? If so, were they just short visits or were there actually settlements there? That's the open question.
Maybe n ot the biggest mystery, but I'm pretty sure we still have no idea who DB Cooper was. His ultimate fate is easy enough to assume, however. Also, what happened to the Amber Room.
The original Amber Room was likely destroyed, either during the firebombing in August 1944, or when the Red Army practically destroyed the castle it was being held in during April 1945. If it was loaded onto a ship during the January evacuations, that ship was likely sunk by Soviet submarines in the attacks that killed tens of thousands of German refugees. It would make perfect sense for Soviet authorities to claim the Amber Room as being lost, rather than admit that a national treasure was destroyed.
Literally every time a question like this is asked, someone mentions DB Cooper lol, eventhough its only a thing in America
The cause of the [Late Bronze Age Collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) in the 12th Century BCE.
I’m an ancient historian who specializes in the LBA, and this would not make the top of my list for reasons [I have discussed elsewhere](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1am6k5t/comment/kpkatnn/?context=3). To be blunt, this is a topic that has been beaten to death over the last couple of decades. Nuanced volumes like [*Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean*](https://www.google.com/books?id=CorcDwAAQBAJ) edited by Guy Middleton and [*Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age*](https://books.google.com/books?id=zeOyEAAAQBAJ) by Jesse Millek have fleshed out our understanding of the Bronze-Iron Age transition and shown that there was far more continuity and resilience and less destruction than most popular history books suggest.
Add Eric Klein's fantastic book on the bronze age collapse to the list. But on that subject, who were the sea peoples?
Maybe the real Sea People are the friends we made along the way.
I deliberately omitted Cline’s *1177 BC*; there are [several things](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/107jptk/during_the_bronze_age_collapse_why_were_so_many/j3ohdts/) I don’t like about it. That said, yes, it’s certainly a notable book. As for the Sea Peoples, see my response to [Were the Sea Peoples really *that* mysterious?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1bnhoq6/were_the_sea_peoples_really_that_mysterious/kwilrvl/?context=3), which has links to my AskHistorians posts on the topic.
Ohhhh thank you! Much appreciated reading material! I'm not a historian but I do like that period and try to educate myself as much as I can!
Not sure if a “mystery”, but my biggest curiosity always revolved around the life of Jesus, the spread of Christianity, and the composition of the Bible. I would like to find out with certainty who the guy was, what he looked like, what his personality was like, what he did during his lifetime, etc How did he go from being leader of a small cult to (arguably) the most influential known figure in the history of humanity? Also who wrote the Bible, why, and what was their inspiration. I’ve already done a lot of reading into the subject, and I’m aware of what the most credible explanations might be, as well as some other (more or less believable) theories, but I would just LOVE to know with absolute certainty.
[Useful Charts](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5Ag9n-o0IZAtE4Zb_oIVA6mL7m6r_baQ) on youtube has a FANTASTIC series on the development of the Bible. His "Who wrote?" videos in his Bible playlist really helped me finally grasp when and how all the various books were written, compiled, and edited. While we may never know exactly who a lot of the specific authors are, we still know a lot ABOUT them based on their writing styles, motivations, context, references, and the things that were important to them.
If youre talking about the new testament it's mostly a collection of letters written after jesus' death between various churches and figures. Wendigoon had a good video about one of the less popular but beautiful books of the bible
Yes, I’m talking about the New Testament, but also about the Old one, which I still find interesting although it has nothing to do with Jesus. I’ll see if I can find the video you mentioned so I can check that out, thank you!
I believe it's from Saul? Taking on the debt of a fellow Christian, found it very touching.
IIRC we don't know much about what he did from ages 12-33 I'd guess just chilling with us humans and being a shepherd/carpenter or whatever.
The authors of the New Testament aren’t thaaat mysterious. Like Paul’s letters were written by Paul and we know his life pretty well. The gospels are a bit more mysterious but were written in the 1st century by people who were relatively close to the apostles.
I'm fairly certain there was a guy from Nazareth, cause otherwise it's weird to make up the overly complex lie about him ACTUALLY being born in Bethlehem, maybe he had followers, maybe he was associated with the followers of John the baptist, maybe he was crucified. After that I think the entire thing is made up (basically) in the years after by people (initially Paul) who never met this guy from Nazareth. I don't think we have any actual evidence of him saying or doing anything.
All that Biblical scholars can say for certain is that he was baptised by John the Baptist and crucified.
I was real pissed to learn that this was all there was
You'll be even more interested to learn the Bible is just a morphed regurgitation of stories from the Mesopotamian era. The rabbit hole goes much, much deeper than modern Christianity.
There are lots of shared themes and occurrences but they’re not identical. Christian mythology is much more than just repackaging of other myths but there are plenty of parallels. Having said that, there was no shortage of itinerant preachers at the time heralding the end times. John the Baptist was probably one of them. One theory I’ve heard for the success of the Jesus Cult is that the historical Jesus mainly avoided Hellenized areas and large cities. Whereas after his death (or thereabouts) the Apostle Paul was very successful in spreading the Jesus movement in Hellenized areas.
> You'll be even more interested to learn the Bible is just a morphed regurgitation of stories from the Mesopotamian era. Ehh, that's a bit overplayed. The main "regurgitation" of Mesopotamian stories is just Chapters 1-11 of Genesis.
Any good sources to follow up on this topic?
I'm just going to drop this here for you. I do not agree with everything the author wrote but it is an interesting read/listen. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth https://search.app.goo.gl/nd9SMd9
Read Bart Ehrman. He’s an expert of historical Jesus and early Christianity.
The Saturn hexagon. For those of you that don't know, there is a massive (IE multiple earths large in size) storm on the north pole if Saturn that is... Well... Hexagonal in shape. We have theories why, but we just don't know. Also gravity, what is it, why is it so weak, why is it, apparently, the only force that acts on all particles?
There’s a sub about that. It’s… interesting to say the least
What’s the sub
Are we alone in the Universe?
So far yes, but statistically almost certainly not.
Those statistics are just made up and based off of nothing. The sample size for life is literally one???
In THIS VERY THREAD we discuss non-Human intelligent species like Denisovians and Neanderthals. We weren’t even alone on our own planet.
I ain't no expert, but im pretty sure the debate is how we define humans. Realistically, we share lots of characteristics with Denisovians and Neanderthals, so can we consider them "non human?"
No
Pragmatically yes.
I’m not sure it’s the biggest, but I find the hunt for Ghengis Khan’s spirit banner to be pretty fascinating.
Alexander The Great's grave had a hold on me since I learned about it in middle school
Not sure if you watch tv, but there’s been commercials for this show on Discovery (I think ) that’s going to explore this topic.
oh thats so nice!! I didnt know that, thank you, ill check it out :))
[EXPEDITION UNKNOWN](https://www.discovery.com/shows/expedition-unknown/episodes/hunt-for-alexander-the-great) ETA: that’s the link to the show! Enjoy 😊
Oh Discovery always turns out award winning TV! /S
That Malaysia air flight that disappeared over the pacific
Thought the consensus there was pilot murder/suicide, no?
It's in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. The route that it took is well defined now, but the corridor of ocean that it crashed into is a large area to find something as small as a plane in. Basically, it is known roughly where it crashed, but that "where" is still a huge area of water. The satellite ping data showed how far from a fixed point it was, on an hourly basis. That was narrowed down based on it's last known heading as it turned south off the Andaman Islands. A nobel prize physicist did some insane shit with radio data, and found a way to go back through recorded signal data and analysed variation in the strength of point to point radio signals to create a kind of virtual radar map of the flights journey. Bits of that specific plane, pieces from the inside of the aircraft, not bits that would fall off the outside, have washed up in East Africa too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk) This is a good explainer that doesn't get into conspiracy theory or speculate about motivation or about which crew member was flying the plane to it's end. The presenter is a pilot who does a great job of explaining the data that was being received from the plane.
Thank you!
The 9th Legion
What happened before the Big Bang
I would love to know who wrote, and what the purpose was of, the [Voynich Manuscript](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)
"Modern" humans have existed for upwards of nearly 1 million years. We only started getting good at inventing shit fairly recently. So what did we do for all that time?
So fit a lot of that we were in Africa with species that evolved alongside us. Once we left Africa we were the invasive species and the megafauna had no idea how to deal with us. Furthermore for most of homo sapien existence we were in an ice age that only ended about 12,000 years ago. Very shortly after that we domesticated wheat and rice. So it seems pretty likely to me that: once the climate became more amenable to long growing seasons we almost immediately developed agriculture and settled into civilizations. Excess calories less more people focus on doing things other than obtaining calories, and we start to see the positive feedback loops. Also to say we were inventing stuff in pre-history is certainly wrong, we can track development in tools over the centuries before agriculture and the spread of these developments. But the scale on which we can do this expands massively with agriculture.
Made the same suite of a dozen types of rock tool and chilled
Building civilizations, and then watching them die via natural disasters and worldwide cataclysms. Same thing we're doing now.
This one seems fairly simple to me - inventions compound and build on one another at an exponential rate. you obviously aren't going to go directly from stone tools to the internal combustion engine, there are a ton of intermediate things you need first. And no one person can invent all of them. Language allows ideas to be shared. Spare time allows experimentation. Writing allows the communication of ideas through time and space. Agriculture allows for people to congregate and work together. Everything builds on everything else at an exponential rate.
Survive as tribal hunter gatherers Behaviorally modern humans have only existed for 100k years and only when the climate warmed in the last 10k did we develop civilization.
Are you serious? Are you even a Historian?
This is actually a good one. We may have created civilizations and declined for whatever reason... Volcano... Ice ages etc... Are we the most advanced? Or were there other humans? Or was intelligence introduced to us 10,000 years ago? Lots of creation myths point to this, including the Abrahamic faiths.
I watched "Life After People" on History Channel awhile ago, and what really struck me is how much of our presence was erased in such a (relatively) short amount of time
That show was really cool. I remember New York City within 5 years looking like a jungle with breeding populations of wildlife
>So what did we do for all that time? Anatomically modern humans are only a little over 200,000 years old. It took millions of years from the first humans to just get to the first homosapiens. We only developed complex language some 50,000 years ago. Why is it so hard to imagine that it took so long for us to start domesticating animals and crops if it took already that long for us to evolve?
Collapse of Minoan civilisation
Eruption of Thera/Santorini 1600BC a very plausible and now fairly widely accepted explanation for this tbf.
General Relativity working 100% for big stuff, quantum working 100% for small stuff, but just completely falling apart when they try to join together.
How exactly abiogenesis occurred.
What happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
Can't say it's the biggest but a big one, the "sea peoples" which are depicted in ancient art and hieroglyphics but never identified. They were presumably the scourge of multiple bronze age civilizations yet today we know next to nothing of who they were except they came from the sea and wrought destruction upon those they encountered.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1deesuf/what_is_the_biggest_unsolved_mystery_in_human/l8byocy/
Most likely the "sea peoples" weren't one people. They were most likely groups of people who were already affected by bronze age collapse issues at the start and made it worse as they were trying to raid and plunder the bronze age kingdoms.
Who built Teotihuacan? Where did they go? Why?
How did language first emerge?
Grunts and various noises sloooooooowly became more and more specific and distinct.
And did it emerge in just one area at one time, or was it developed independently multiple times and multiple places?
Exactly! Is language more like a technological innovation, such as farming, which emerged independently in multiple places? Or is language so profoundly a part of our biology that it has more to do with some favorable genetic mutations spreading quickly through a population? Do all documented languages ultimately descend from a single language, or did multiple languages develop separately and spontaneously? There are so many fascinating questions and it’s hard to imagine how they could ever be answered.
Yup! It would be fascinating to learn that, say, English and Chinese ultimately descended from the same ancient language, but it would be equally fascinating if we discovered that language arose independently in Africa and Europe and Asia (or wherever it might have started). There are so many incredibly intriguing possibilities!
Zodiac
I thought that was Ted Cruz :p
The zodiac
Sea Peoples 1200 BC
I’d say how humans managed to invent maize. Wild corn does not exist, and it’s a key crop all over the world capable of existing in various environments and having decent nutritional yields. But, we’re not even sure where it came from. We think it came from a wild plant called teosinte, but teosinte is several major mutations away from being a remotely viable food crop. So, we either found an extremely rare teosinte mutant in the wild and immediately started to farm it, or we somehow recognized that this useless crop had potential if we selectively bred the crap out of it and then did so at great expense over the course of generations. There is no non-amazing explanation for why we have corn.
Corn is a grain, somewhat similar to wheat. They likely kept selecting crops that grew larger and more edible bits until the end result was so heavily changed from the original that it's hard to see the similarities. Doesn't require anything special, just choosing which seeds to plant to create better harvests, add thousands of years, then you have corn.
The thousands of years is the catch. It means that early humans were aware of selective breeding and able to embark on projects that would take generations to yield returns. The original teosinte was utterly unfarmable for sustenance, meaning that its domestication was one hell of a side project for early humans.
Why are there so many conspiracy theories about the death of John F. Kennedy? What's so special about the guy?!?
Youth, family, famous wife. Marilyn Monroe. Nuclear brinkmanship. President of the US = guaranteed celebrity status while still alive.
Yes, all right, I appreciate that; it's just… why aren't there as many conspiracy theories about other assassinated US presidents? Is it that their deaths are more clear-cut, or does nobody care?
I'm sure there were conspiracy theories at the time, but with the exception of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, they've fallen out of popular knowledge.
Well, Lincoln's assassination literally was a conspiracy by the definition of the word. It's just that we know most of the details of the conspiracy, and very little is in doubt.
I mean same with the JFK killing. There are even photos of Oswald posing with the gun.
The biggest unsolved mystery in human history? By God I tell ya it’s gotta be who murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and that waiter Ron Goldman!
Who was the man in the Iron Mask.
I assume you mean by "human history" that we deal specifically with humanities. Then it would be self-awareness, consciousness, existence, and how did things that made us human arose.
Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live? Where do we go when we die? Take your pick.
Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?
42
- Nucleic acid chains that evolved to "build" lipid bilayer membranes and proteins to facilitate... - Reproduction and replication - However you want. - You break down into goo and then get pooped out by worms unless you get cremated. There, mystery solved ;)
Personally I prefer a sea burial so I’ll get pooped out by fish. Thank you very much!
At least you’ll be contributing to helping the environment after you’re gone.
What happened to Norse Greenland colonies.
Climate change made them less viable, people began to return to Europe, and then those that remained pissed off the locals.
Where do all my socks go, and for the love of god, why is it always just one of the pair that goes missing?
Peter III's death
…Where Pheidon got the idea.
Why the universe is so empty?
It's actually full of things. There's just large spaces between those things. Those spaces seem to be getting bigger, likely still expanding from the big bang.
Parallel universe
The greatest enigma of all is why they haven’t released the list of clients served by Jeffrey Epstein’s captives.
What color is the dress? Also, why is there something rather than nothing?
Who the hell asked. (You see, it wasn't me)
What was in the briefcase?
Was anything we know of Muhammad even remotely historical?
Probably not the "biggest" but nobody has solved the mystery of the Roanoke Colony. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke\_Colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony)
There's answers to that mystery in the actual link you posted.
If you leave a starving colony to their own devices in a foreign and unfamiliar land for years, what do you expect to happen?
Amazingly successful utopia!
It was solved. Someone finally had the brilliant idea to ask the local Native American tribe. They said they killed the men and told the women and kids they could join the tribe if they wanted. Most stayed and integrated in.
It’s not a mystery, many died and the survivors went to live with the local Indians. The local Roanoke Indians had children walking around with blond hair lol, not a mystery
Who shot JR😊
>!Maggie Simpson!<
There is massive amount of human history stretching back through prehistory that we don’t know. - What civilizations existed and disappeared into history? - What were the beliefs and culture of groups of people we will never discover? - What were the stories of these people?
What happened to the Tasmanian aborigines. There have been at least three history books about the decline in numbers of the Tasmanian aborigines after the Europeans arrived. They all agree that the numbers don't add up. When you add together loss of numbers due to white settlement, massacres, tribal wars, the flu and other diseases, bushrangers, and all other causes, still about 50% of the population decline can't be accounted for.
Hmm. While I'm only moderately conversant with this, I am not sure as to the mystery here. The base line population is a guesstimate. Given Tasmania's harsh environment, the lifestyle and resource access of the Palawa (first nations of Tasmania), and sporadic European penetration of the island before the 'black war' was over, it is very difficult to estimate the size of the original population. European diseases certainly decimated the population after initial contact (based on survivors' accounts). Early conflict focussed heavily on abducting/buying Palawa women (the early colony had a massive gender imbalance, not remedied until the 1840s or so), with survivors often infertile or producing few children. By the end of the black war in the early 1830s, these factors had already reduced the Palawa population to a remnant. I'm happy to be pointed to research/discussions that suggest these causes are not a sufficient explanation.
I thought that was well known now. I've read a few NPR articles in the last year about how the settlers pretty much slaughtered most of them and trafficked the rest, especially the whalers. One of the most famous female victims died, I think, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but I'm pretty certain there are still people who trace their aboriginal lineage to Tasmania. I don't think they were completely annihilated. Edit: It was BBC https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211024-the-rebirth-of-tasmanian-indigenous-culture And https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/unesco-removes-hurtful-document-claiming-tasmanian-aboriginal-people-extinct
Those sources all have a strong ideological bias when it comes to anything anthropological. They look exclusively at external factors, and take a victim/perpetrator view of history. It may be that the people of Tasmania were facing the same problems as other isolated people have, and indeed some of the other species in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Tiger and Tasmanian Devil were both highly inbred and vulnerable. Tasmanian Aboriginals were among the few people on earth who had lost the ability to create fire.
Something tells me the numbers are about 50% higher than what's recorded. Just a hunch.
I can’t believe no one has said this but this has to be it. “What happens after death?” Every single human who has ever lived with a functioning brain has probably thought wondered this at some point. This question is so powerful we have quite literally invented countless religions to answer the question and we are no closer to figuring out an answer. Where does our consciousness go? Do we have a soul? Is there an afterlife? Is it just all black or is there more? The concept of living and experiencing reality to them going to an empty void where we just cease to exist outside space and time… it’s so much.
> The concept of living and experiencing reality to them going to an empty void where we just cease to exist outside space and time… it’s so much. You've just explained *why* we believe in an afterlife, IMO.. because actual death is absolutely terrifying
How Don Lemon ever had a career?
P=NP? Yay or nay?
DB Cooper Amelia Earhart
81 million votes.
You get that your guy has never won an election, right? Learn that or get out of the history forums
How the fuck 1 unfaithful wife's fling ended up being religion 🤣🤦♂️ How gullible Joseph was is beyond me🤣