The World’s Greatest Mysteries: Part 1

Mysteries 6 Minutes

I love a good mystery, don’t you?  I found this article on Mental Floss and wanted to share!

From Mentalfloss.com:

1 Where is Cleopatra’s tomb?

Finding the burial place of Cleopatra VII, who is usually considered the last monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great—and therefore the last pharaoh of Egypt—would undoubtedly be one of the crowning archaeological achievements in modern history. The problem is, no one knows where to look.  Conventional wisdom places Cleopatra’s tomb beside her palace in an area of ancient Alexandria that is now submerged beneath the Mediterranean Sea. If this is the case, the tomb is likely lost forever. 

But a few researchers have set their sights on Taposiris Magna, the location of a temple dedicated to Osiris, the Egyptian ruler of the realm of the dead, near Alexandria’s western outskirts. Since Cleopatra wanted to associate herself and her Roman lover, Mark Antony, with Osiris and his sister-wife, Isis, some believe it stands to reason that the two could be interred there. Excavations at Taposiris Magna were still underway in 2023, and have so far yielded 16 burial chambers, mummies with golden tongues, funeral masks, coins engraved with the legendary queen’s face, and a tunnel more than 4000 feet long—but no signs of Cleopatra.

If you’re especially captivated by the legend of Cleopatra’s tomb, you’re welcome to help look for it: The Taposiris Magna excavation has been turned into a hands-on tourist experience that starts at about $21,000 per person. 

2 What happened on the Mary Celeste?

If you’ve heard of the Mary Celeste, you can thank Arthur Conan Doyle. The unexplained abandonment of the ship in 1872—and the still-unknown fate of the 10 people aboard—might have been forgotten if not for Conan Doyle publishing a sensational short story about the fictional Marie Celeste in 1884 that captured the popular imagination and turned the American merchant ship into one of the most enduring maritime mysteries of all time.

In terms of solving the mystery of the Mary Celeste and the fate of its captain, his wife and 2-year-old daughter, and its seven-man crew, Doyle’s highly fictionalized account, involving a missing African artifact and a murderous mutiny led by a man who had been born into enslavement in America, was unhelpful. But the official inquiry conducted years earlier had also failed to come up with any reason for the crew to have abandoned a seaworthy vessel. There was three and half feet of water in the hold and a pump had been dismantled, and the ship’s lifeboat was gone. But the ship was safe and operable when it was found drifting near the Azores islands, and the crew who found it had no trouble sailing it 800 miles to Gibraltar to file a salvage claim. 

In 2006, a chemistry professor at University College London proposed a solution: A “pressure-wave type of explosion” caused by the ship’s cargo—around 1700 barrels of industrial alcohol—and some unknown spark had caused little damage but frightened the crew into abandoning the vessel. But other researchers have discounted the theory. While the mystery around the Mary Celeste remains unsolved, it continues to serve as inspiration for storytellers: Season 4 of True Detective was partially inspired by the abandoned ship as well as the Dyatlov Pass incident, another historical head scratcher. 

3 What caused the Great Unconformity?

In 1869, American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell was working in the Grand Canyon when he noticed something strange: What should have been thousands of feet of rock were just hundreds, and as tools and techniques improved, it became clear that in parts of the Grand Canyon over a billion years’ worth of rock was missing. Since the missing time immediately precedes the Cambrian explosion—the period when evolution seems to have kicked into high gear and life on Earth suddenly and rapidly diversified—scientists would very much like to know more about it. 

Rock strata are full of gaps, or “unconformities,” but a billion years is a big one, even in terms of geologic time. As geologist Kalin McDannell explained to science mag Eos, it’s the difference between a book that’s missing a few pages and one that’s had entire chapters torn out. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a local phenomenon—since Powell noticed the anomaly in the Grand Canyon, it’s been spotted in other parts of the world as well. The gap is twice as large in some places, representing more than 40 percent of the planet’s history that just isn’t there.

So where did it go? Two main theories have emerged in recent years. The first maintains that the missing rock was scoured away by glaciers a few hundred million years ago, during what’s known as the Snowball Earth period. The other theory is a little more dramatic: The culprit might be Rodinia, a supercontinent that predates Pangaea and potentially sliced away huge swathes of what would become our geologic record as pieces of the enormous land mass broke away, slid around the planet, and smashed back together. It’s also possible that the Great Unconformity isn’t one gap, but many smaller ones caused by a series of distinct geologic events.

Whatever the cause, the Great Unconformity is a case of one mystery that might hold the key to another. Some researchers believe that when the missing rock was deposited into Earth’s oceans, it altered the chemistry of the water and seeded it with vast amounts of minerals and nutrients. This could have given early lifeforms the resources they needed to evolve helpful things like shells and skeletons, setting the stage for the Cambrian explosion.  

4 What’s up with the Salish Sea feet?

If you type the phrase Salish Sea into Google’s search field, the autocomplete feature assumes you’re going to ask it about all those feet. The phenomenon seems to have started in 2007, when a 12-year-old girl found a running shoe containing a human foot on a British Columbia beach. Since then, more than 20 disembodied feet, most of them secured in sneakers, have washed ashore on the Salish Sea’s U.S. and Canadian coastlines. The embarrassment of extremities has prompted sinister theories ranging from the somewhat plausible (a serial killer is clearly at work) to the fantastic (it’s obviously aliens). Science, however, has requested that we all calm down a little and consider the facts. 

For starters, authorities have ruled out foul play, determining that several of the feet belonged to people who died accidentally or by suicide. Roughly 8.7 million people live along these shores, and there’s a grim correlation between seaside population density and the number of corpses that end up in the water. But if it’s a natural phenomenon, why is it just feet? Why did it start happening so recently? And why just the shores around the Salish Sea? 

Science can help us here, too. The bodies of drowning victims—a category that would include most of the people who die in the waters of the Salish Sea—tend to sink, where their soft tissue is consumed by bottom-dwelling animals such as crabs and lobsters. Since soft tissue is much of what’s holding our feet on, they can easily become detached. If they’re tucked inside running shoes or hiking boots that are made of lightweight, buoyant materials—technology that began to develop rapidly around the time the feet started washing ashore—they’re likely to bob up to the surface, where the Salish Sea’s distinctive combination of geography, wind conditions, and currents conspire to deposit them on beaches rather than carry them out to the open ocean. For all intents and purposes, we can probably mark this one “solved.”

5 How—and why—were the Olmec Heads made?

Long before the Maya (at least the Classical Period of Maya) and Aztecs built sophisticated civilizations in what is now Central America and Mexico, the area was home to the Olmecs, a society that flourished around 3200 to 2400 years ago. As the first great civilization of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs are sometimes considered a “mother culture” that influenced many of the peoples who would come in their wake. They cultivated an extensive trade network and possessed impressive engineering skills, but we know them best for the spectacular art they left behind, including approximately 17 colossal stone heads that have been discovered to date. 

The mystery of the heads is two-fold. First, their size—some are nearly 10 feet tall, and they weigh about 8 tons on average—would have presented enormous logistical challenges. Each head is carved from a single volcanic basalt boulder, and each of those boulders had to be moved more than 50 miles from where it was sourced. How did they do it? And second, why did they go to all that trouble?

Given the resources and labor required to transport and create them and the fact that they appear to depict distinct individuals, most archaeologists think the heads are portraits of powerful Olmec rulers (though some have suggested they could represent ballgame players who were maybe not that good). As for how they were moved such long distances, several theories have been suggested, ranging from wooden rollers to enormous rafts to temporary causeways built specifically for their transport. Answering these questions would fill in some important blanks in our knowledge of human history, but so far researchers can only make educated guesses. 

SOURCE: MENTAL FLOSS

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Published by pat frederick

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154 thoughts on “The World’s Greatest Mysteries: Part 1”

  6. https://twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1850927390870147453

    Twitchy: “Hey, if you are looking for a diversion from this election madness … let’s argue about Star Wars! Yesterday, California Congressman Robert Garcia decided to argue that many classic franchises are ‘about’ progressive causes:

    Sigh. But the fun part is when Adam Bray responded. Who is Adam Bray? This is what Wookiepedia said about him:

    Adam Bray is a professional journalist and author. He has written the Star Wars books Star Wars: What Makes a Monster? and Star Wars Rebels: The Visual Guide. He is one of two authors of Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, one of four authors of Ultimate Star Wars, one of two authors of Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia, and one of two authors of Star Wars: Stormtroopers: Beyond the Armor and Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, Updated and Expanded.

    So, he’s not exactly Timothy Zahn, but he has written about Star Wars a lot, and this is what he said in response to the Congresscritter:

    https://twitter.com/authoradambray/status/1851118533683659148

    The cut off text reads:

    He was against big corporations, big Pharma and Wall Street, against invading foreign countries with our military, he was pro free-speech & anti-censorship… and thus he was basically against everything the Democrat Party of today now stands for. These ideals were baked into Star Wars. 

    George Lucas believed in forgiveness and redemption for all who seek it, as seen in Luke & Vader’s relationship. Democrats of today believe in canceling people and destroying their lives for even the smallest statements on social media that violate the sacred woke code. Yoda said “Size Matters Not.” He taught that character matter, not your appearance. But woke Democrats of today, in contrast, value demographics like skin color, gender and sexual choices above all else. Progressives gate-keep and “other” people, shutting them out of conversations and opportunities with their racist DEI. 

    The Rebels of Star Wars fought against a regime that controlled the mainstream press. The Empire controlled the official narratives and they censored all objections. They conspired with corporations to silence all criticism. They weaponized the legal system against anyone that stood in their way. The Empire controlled all the large corporations. They owned the military industrial complex. They dominated and dictated every aspect of the culture. In this way the Democrat party of today embodies everything the Empire of Star Wars stood for.

    The Republicans, Conservatives and supporters of Trump stand against the all-powerful establishment ruling every aspect of this country now. They are now the mavericks. The Republicans now embody the ideals of the Rebels of George Lucas’s Star Wars. 

    “I’ll never turn to the dark side. You have failed, your highness.” – Luke Skywalker

    https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2024/11/01/star-wars-writer-sets-the-record-straight-on-star-wars-and-the-modern-left-n2402969

    Liked by 1 person

  7. “The Ministry of Truth is real…I thought they told us that we were conspiracy theorists for thinking this 2 days ago? What happen?”

    Liked by 1 person

  9. I guess this is Kim Kardashian…..what a freak!

    “Anyone catch Kim K’s “albino alligator” Halloween costume? Yep, very reptilian energy…”

    Liked by 1 person

  10. “Someone has constructed a naked 50 ft statue of Donald Trump in Philly. Those two cops are the icing on the cake. Yep bro, let’s just look at it…”

    Liked by 1 person

  11. SMDH – stupid is as stupid does!!!

    ENTIRE ARTICLE: “Brazilian influencers Aline Tamara Moreira de Amorim, 37, and Beatriz Tavares da Silva Faria, 27, reportedly drowned after attending a luxury yacht party off São Paulo’s picturesque coastline. The two had spent the evening surrounded by friends and fellow revelers, celebrating aboard a yacht near São Vicente.

    According to local reports, rough waters and a crowded vessel added to the risks of the late-night journey. Aline and Beatriz, along with five others, climbed into a small speedboat with a capacity for only five passengers. Witnesses say that the two women, eager to keep their evening’s glow intact, reportedly declined life jackets, fearing they’d interfere with their tans and the selfies that had captured the joyful evening.

    “Some didn’t want to wear it [the life jackets] because they were taking selfies,” São Vicente police commissioner Marcos Alexandre Alfino told TV Tribuna. He went on to say that passengers had been chatting and unworried as they left the yacht, with the life jackets perceived as an unnecessary addition. Sadly, that decision became fatal when the speedboat capsized in the choppy waves, and Aline and Beatriz were swept into the dark waters….”

    Investigators are now working to determine whether the deaths were a tragic accident or if more precautions could have been taken. “All this is being determined very calmly to conclude if the fatalities were based on recklessness or negligence,” Commissioner Alfino explained, pointing to testimony from the boat’s captain, who has cooperated fully with the ongoing inquiry.

    The two women’s deaths have stirred heartbreak in the influencer community. Just days earlier, PetaPixel reported another incident in Brazil where an influencer fell while filming a video, marking a concerning trend as individuals push boundaries for content.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. LOL – no, actually – it’s not ALL squirrels. Just the ones that pester me! I’ve wondered actually what it would be like to have one as a pet but they are kinda like raccoons – get into EVERYTHING!

        Liked by 1 person

  16. I am adding a short daily prayer to the board. I would invite each of you, if you wish, to also add one or maybe two of your own liking. I do not want to stifle anyone but please limit yourself to one or two religious postings. here’s one I found that I liked.

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