25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds Scientists Still Can't Explain

Archaeology is a strange occupation. You spend most of your career searching for things without ever being totally sure what you're going to find when you go looking. Most of the time, you'll find objects and artifacts that can easily be explained with a little research. But every so often, you'll find yourself totally stumped by a discovery. This video is all about those strange discoveries. Thanks to robotic diving technology, we're now able to see the bottom of the ocean floor in detail for the first time in history. And some of the things we're finding down there are pretty surprising. Take these bizarre tracks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, for example. There are around 3,500 of these 6-foot-long indentations in the seabed, all of which are around 8 inches deep. The patterns are in the Clarion-Clipperton zone of the ocean between Hawaii and Mexico and were first noticed in August 2018. Marine biologists believe that they were probably made by a large deep-water organism, but no organism capable of making marks like this has ever been discovered. The possibility of the indentations being created randomly has been ruled out, and the way that the tracks curve and meander reminds some observers of gigantic footprints. They occur at a depth of around 12,000 feet. Based on what we know of science, no creature large enough to make such an impression on the seabed should be able to survive at such a depth. Belief in witchcraft was common in the England of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a misguided belief that led many unfortunate women to being drowned. But evidence of the fear that the people of the time had for these supposed witches can be found everywhere. The Creswell Crags in the Nottinghamshire region of the country bear the scars of these beliefs. The caves are full of apotropaic marks, carvings made on the stone walls, that supposedly prevented evil spirits from being raised from the underworld via witchcraft. When they were first discovered, they were thought to be graffiti, but they were officially reclassified in 2019. Markings like these aren't rare in the country, but they're usually found around the doorways of medieval churches in the homes of the wealthy. Their placement here suggests that people once thought that demons or other undesirable entities could return to the land of the living through the cave network. And so the markings would prevent witches from gathering here and summoning the creatures with their arcane powers. If you travel along the path of the ancient Silk Road that connects China to Europe, you'll come across the Mogao Caves on Mingxia Hill, just south of the desert town of Dunhuang in China. They're empty now, but between the 4th and 14th centuries, they were used as shrines by Buddhists, who would gather here to pray for success before embarking upon long journeys. The existence of the caves has never been a secret, but nobody knew about the treasure hidden within them until a Taoist priest, Wang Huanlu, performed a detailed exploration in 1900. While in the 17th cave in the network, he uncovered a collection of 40,000 documents covering a series of topics from medicine to art. But the most notable of all the documents in there was the Dunhuang Star Chart. It was created somewhere around the year 700 and is the oldest known record of ancient Chinese astronomy. The map is an accurate representation of the positions of the stars as they would have appeared in the skies of the time and includes details of celestial bodies that ought to have been invisible to the naked eye. How this unknown ancient mapmaker could have had such an understanding of the heavens has never been explained. Total mystery surrounds the origin of our next artifact. It was first recorded as being in the possession of the Swedish Museum in 1830, but radiocarbon analysis has shown it to be approximately 5,000 years old. It's a round tablet made from alabaster and covered in hieroglyphs that suggest an ancient Egyptian origin, but nobody knows where it was before the Swedish Museum acquired it. Even people with detailed knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics have found its meaning hard to decipher. Some people even think it looks like an ancient dashboard or control panel. Some of the round wells on the tablet appear to have been placed there to hold oils and incense, but it doesn't look like any incense or oil-holding device that's ever been recovered from Egypt before. With a diameter of over two feet, it's also too large to be practical for a device with such a humble purpose. What was it really made for, and why have we never found anything else that looks even remotely like it? Perhaps we'll never know. South America is a continent with a rich cultural history, and Mexico, in particular, has been the home of several mighty ancient civilizations. The Aztecs, Inca, and Mayans once roamed the land of what is now Mexico, and they left some strange things behind them after they left. Their figurines are especially bizarre, and these frightening figures with their large heads and wide black eyes are of particular interest to those who believe that our ancient forefathers came into contact with extraterrestrials regularly. There has to be a reason why the figures so closely resemble the stereotypical grey alien that's so commonly described by people who claim to have come into contact with otherworldly beings. The statues, which come from the Guanjuanto region, have been found in a variety of contexts. Some are standalone figures, whereas others have been added as decoration on the site of jugs, bowls, and other ceramic creations. Are they abstract interpretations of frogs or toads, or are they accurate depictions of an unknown race who visited our planet many centuries ago? Staying in Mexico for a moment, these towering column-like statues go by the name of the Tula Giants, or the Atlantis de Tula, as their name suggests, you'll find them in the Tula region. They're not exactly a secret, they're standing in plain sight and in the open, but we know very little about them. The figures stand on a platform erected on a hilltop, offering them a panoramic view of the land around them. It's possible that the once mighty Toltec civilization placed them there as a warning to anybody who might be considering invading their territory. If that was their intention, it didn't work. The Toltec civilization fell during the 12th century when their lands were invaded by a plethora of different tribes at the same time. Even the Aztecs, who came later, looked upon the Tula Giants with a sense of reverence. Any chance of finding out their true origin and purpose was lost when the Aztec emperor Iscote ordered the destruction of all documented pre-Aztec history in the region during his reign. The Kaimanawa Wall in New Zealand has all the tell-tale signs of being made by human hands. Found in the Kaimanawa Forest, close to the country's Lake Taupo, it appears to have been made from a series of rectangular rocks with the symmetrical gaps and lines between the rocks showing the spaces where one block ends and the other begins. The method of creation looks similar to the Ahu stone platforms on Easter Island. It might therefore surprise you to hear that the official story about this wall is that it was created by nature, not nurture. In fact, the idea of human beings building this wall is absurd, scientists say. The stones have been standing in their current position for more than 300,000 years. They try to explain away the cracks and lines, saying that they occurred as the rock cooled after it was formed. But would such a process result in such regular, symmetrical cracks? Why would the stones all be so rectangular in shape? Some locals insist that the wall was built by the Waitahas tribe before the arrival of the Moraes on New Zealand. But even the existence of that tribe is debated among the Moraes, who claim to have been the first human settlers on New Zealand when they arrived eight centuries ago. Chess is one of the oldest board games in the world, and if you have an exceptionally old chessboard at home, you might find that the pieces are worth a lot of money. One single piece of the notorious set known as the Lewis Chessmen was bought at an auction for less than $10 in Scotland in 1964 and is now worth more than $750,000. The chess pieces were discovered on the Scottish Isle of Lewis in 1831, but was made somewhere around the 12th century and probably came from Norway. Each piece of the chess set, which is originally thought to have contained 93 pieces, was delicately carved from a combination of walrus ivory and sperm whale teeth. The piece that was bought at the Scottish auction is a character known as a warden and was thought to have been missing for two centuries when its true value was finally realised in 2019. The family of the original buyer had kept it in their possession for more than 50 years, but sadly, they're unable to shed any light on the question of how it came to be separated from the original set and sold at auction in the first place. The story of James Ossuary is controversial, and whether or not you choose to believe it might depend on your religious faith. If we take the object at face value, it's a limestone box containing the remains of an ancient Israelite called James. On the exterior of the box, carved into the limestone, is etched a Hebrew phrase that translates as, James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. Many Christians believe that this is genuine archaeological evidence for the existence of the Jesus Christ of the Bible. The authenticity of the box cannot be denied, it's definitely a limestone burial box, it definitely contains human remains, and it was definitely created at some point during the first century. But sceptics believe that the inscription on the side was added at a much later date. It's commonly thought that Oded Golan, the Israeli antiques dealer who brought the artifact to the world's attention in 2002, may even have added it himself. He was put on trial for forgery in relation to the box, but was acquitted. To this day, he maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing and the ossuary is a genuine biblical artifact. We could easily classify the entire existence of the Hongshan culture as an archaeological curiosity. Aside from knowing that they lived around China's Liao River during Neolithic times, we know almost nothing else about them, aside from the fact that they were particularly gifted in the art of making sculptures out of jade. We wish they'd left a few more records of their existence because if they had, we might be able to ascertain the intended meaning of the sculptures. They all represent humanoid figures, but there's no way that any of them could possibly be human. To some, they look like dragons, while other people look upon them and see deer or goats like some of the Mayan or ancient Mexican artifacts we mentioned earlier on. They also appear to bear more than a passing resemblance to the classic gray alien type that often appears in stories about unidentified flying objects. Was the Hongshan culture visited by a species from outer space? Or do these pieces have more abstract meaning that we simply don't possess enough clues to work out? You don't need to be an expert in archaeology or zoology to work out what the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe is. All the information you could possibly need is right there in the name. It's a relic of the kingdom of Mapungubwe, which once existed in part of what is now South Africa between the 11th and 13th centuries. What makes this tiny statue so remarkable is the fact that it survived for so long despite being so delicate and small. It could fit in the palm of your hand, and despite appearing to be golden, it's actually a wooden carving coated in a thin layer of gold leaf. The piece was recovered from a royal grave in the region in 1932 and has provided the first and to date only evidence that a class-based society lived in South Africa in ancient times. The ruling elite of the region appear to have literally lived above their subjects on a hilltop and benefited from the wealth generated by Mapungubwe's popularity as a trading center. Why this civilization had such a unique hierarchical structure for both the region and the era is unknown. We're also at a loss to explain the singular nature of the rhino. It's the only one of its type ever found. There are two ways to look upon the Minaret of Jam One way is to see it as a crumbling relic and perhaps the loneliest minaret in the whole world. The other is to see it as the final trace of the once mighty turquoise mountain city which is held up by those who believe in it as an ancient utopia. What we do know for sure is that it hasn't always been this lonely. Back when it was built in the 12th century, it was just one part of a giant mosque by a river. The foundations of which can still be just about seen in the riverbank. It's said that for more than 100 years, followers of many faiths lived alongside each other in the mountain city without disagreement or strife. Unfortunately for those peace-loving souls, they were driven from the land by the advancing hordes of the Mongols during the late 13th century. And most records of their existence have been destroyed. That makes it hard to verify any record of their existence except of course for the over 200-foot-tall spire. Sadly, it's already begun to collapse and one day soon, it will crumble into the earth. The Tomio Maruyama is already one of the most famous coffin burial mounds in Japan and has been for a very long time. There are several established facts about the tomb, including that it was created during the late 4th century. It's the largest of all the coffin burial mounds in Japan, which explains why it's taken archaeologists such a long time to fully excavate it. When they finally did so in January 2023, they came across something strange. A person buried at the very center of the tomb with an enormous bronze mirror and a 7-foot-long iron sword placed across their chest. Even the coffin that the deceased is buried in is unusually large, measuring just over 16 feet from top to bottom. Large mirrors have often been found inside the tombs of the elite in China, but this is the first time that such a discovery has happened in Japan. The artifact is shield-shaped and covered in interweaving patterns. Experts say the patterns are identical to a coffin period mirror known as the Daryukyo, and so they've named it the Daryuman shield-shaped bronze mirror. It's not the most imaginative title, but at least it's accurate. Close to the village of Gantofta in Sweden is a large sandstone rock outcrop covered in carvings. They're known as the Slippranor Gantofta. For many years, it was thought that the markings were caused by nothing more remarkable than people sharpening their knives and axes on the rock, leaving behind long, deep grooves as they did so. Recently, though, experts have been reassessing the carvings, and they believe they've spotted something. They think the concave nature of these horizontal grooves might mean that they were made by a pendulum motion, similar to that of a rotating wheel. If that's the case, the markings were made with intent. Some Swedish historians believe that they might have had either magical or religious significance to the people who made them. It may also be significant that they're situated on the escarpment of the Ra river valley. We know that the pitted ware culture lived in this part of Sweden around 5,000 years ago, but we can't be certain that the grooves were carved during this period. Some people think they can see faces in the stones, but that's probably just pareidolia. Not many people visit the Tassili-na-Azure National Park. That's understandable because it's in the Algerian part of the Sahara Desert. It's a rich hunting ground for archaeologists, though, and it's also the home of the Tassili mushroom figure. Historians and scientists are as sure as they can be that the mushroom figure was created during the Neolithic era. They're also as sure as they can be that they know what it represents. They think it's a depiction of a shaman partaking in hallucinogens, specifically the type known as magic mushrooms. If they're right, this is easily the oldest evidence of humans using mushrooms as a recreational drug in the world. Prehistoric rock art was first identified in this national park in the 1910s, but further discoveries were made in the 1930s and 1960s. There are other depictions of mushroom use in rock art, but none so striking as this one. Aside from being the oldest depiction of someone using magic mushrooms, it could also be one of the oldest anthropomorphic works of rock art in the world. If dragons have never existed, why did the ancient Greeks build houses for them? That might seem like a facetious question, but you'll find plenty of people in Greece who believe that these odd ruins, found on the south side of the Greek island of Euboea, truly were made to house the mythical beasts. The megalithic houses were made without the use of any mortar, with lentils and jams holding everything together. The sheer weight of the rocks pressed on top of each other like this ought to crush the doorway, but it doesn't. Scientists can't even work out how ancient builders managed to move the mass of rocks into their current position in the first place. To compound the mystery, each dragon house is built at a high altitude and contains a circular roof opening. Presumably, that's how the dragons got in and out. The doorways must have been for their human visitors. Unusually for ancient Greece, no record of the construction of the dragon houses exists. We have no idea who built them, how they built them, or why they built them. No wonder the locals suspect that magical creatures were involved. Very little is known about Italian mapmaker Urbano Monti. We know he was born in Milan and that his parents were aristocrats. We presume that he had a very keen interest in travel and geography. If he didn't, he couldn't have come up with the enormous map that he's famous for. A map that displayed knowledge that someone from his time shouldn't have had. The colossal map, made of 60 individual sheets of paper and measuring 27 square feet when fully assembled, has the North Pole at its center, a perspective that nobody else would have used in 1587 when Monti completed his work and very few people use even today. His idea of Japan is a little off-kilter. It's positioned east to west rather than north to south and yet it has accurate place names and locations marked on it that no other western map of the era featured. Monti had never been to Japan. We have no idea how he acquired that knowledge or why he felt so able to draw the earth as it might appear if he were hovering far above the North Pole when he was making his sketches. Mount Loura is both the northernmost point and the highest peak in the the height of over 5,100 feet. That's impressively tall, but that isn't the reason Mount Loura is in our video. Pay close attention to the shape of the rock at the highest point of the peak. Plenty of people say that it looks like a woman's face. Scientists will tell you that the rock has taken on this shape because of the effects of weathering over hundreds of thousands of years, but not everybody agrees. The face has been nicknamed Dame de Mali, named in honor of a small town not far from the mountain. She's perfectly positioned to overlook the forested gorges beneath her and is considered to be their guardian by those who believe that her features were carved by human hands. She's become one of the region's most important attractions for visitors but isn't currently afforded any special protection. Without any such protection, erosion will eventually wipe her face off the mountain. The Muisca people lived in Colombia before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. The brutality of the conquistadors led to the near-destruction of the Muisca culture, which means we don't understand as much about it as we'd like to. However, we know enough about the Muisca calendar to admire it greatly. It's a surprisingly complex lunar-solar calendar and recognizes three different types of years. The Muisca recognized rural years, holy years, and common years. They divided the months up into periods of 30 days and a common year was 20 months long. To the Muisca, 20 was the perfect number because it was equal to the number of fingers and toes. Rural years, on the other hand, lasted 12 months and followed the seasons much as our years do now. The holy year was 37 months long and historians aren't quite sure why. Records of the calendar can be found on several Muisca artifacts including the Chochistón, several ceremonial flutes, textiles, and a large astronomical site called El Infernito. At the start of each new holy year, the Muisca performed a ceremony called the jumping toad. Regrettably, we have no idea what the ceremony involved. In 1389, a Jain businessman called Darnasah claimed to have had a divine vision while in the village of Ranakpur in Rajasthan, India. In this vision, he was told to build a temple like no other in India. Not one to disobey the will of the gods, Darnasah immediately began work on what would eventually become the Ranakpur Jain temple. Also known as the Chattimarka Dharnavihara, he dedicated his temple to Aruna, the first Tirthanaka of the Avasarpini in Jain cosmology. It is now thought of as the biggest and most important Jain culture temple and contains several smaller temples within its footprint. It took Darnasah and his team a very long time to complete their work. According to a copper-placed inscription inside the temple, it wasn't finished until 1436. Some sources say that additional construction work continued until 1496, by which time Darnasah was long dead. The most beautiful and iconic artifact within the temple is a carved idol of Parshvanatha, made from a single slab of marble and decorated with more than a thousand snake heads. The intricacy of the work here would likely be impossible to replicate today. Latin is an ancient language, but how far back in history does it go? Well, we know that it goes back at least 2700 years, thanks to the existence of the Duenos inscription, which is one of the earliest known old Latin texts ever discovered. It is inscribed in an unlikely place, along the sides of a trio of small vases known as a kernos. The vases and their puzzling inscription were found by the German archaeologist Heinrich Dressel in the valley of Quirinali close to Rome, Italy in 1880. Today, the kernos is held in the Stadtliche Museen in Berlin, Germany. Although it's usually possible to translate Old Latin, translating the Duenos inscription has thus far proved to be impossible. It doesn't help much that it was written without any spaces to separate individual words, nor that some of the letters can't be distinguished nor deduced by context. More than 50 different translations have been proposed since the artifact was found, most of which differ radically from each other, and none of which have gained acceptance via consensus. Research is still ongoing, so maybe we'll decipher the message one day. We tend to think of Tutankhamen as the boy king of ancient Egypt because of his tender age, but Tutankhamen was old enough to have children of his own. We know that because we found two of them. Sadly, they didn't live very long. The children, both of whom were girls, were buried in their father's tomb and so were discovered when it was opened by Howard Carter in 1922. The inscriptions on their tiny coffins refer to them as the Osiris, meaning the deceased, so we don't even know their names. Somewhat inauspiciously, they're now known as Mummies 317a and 317b. The mother of the girls was probably Tutankhamen's wife, Ankhesenamen, who might be the mummy currently labeled KV21a. Mummy 317a was born prematurely after only five or six months' gestation, whereas 317b was born at or near full term. Their appearance is unusual, and while conditions like spina bifida and Sprengel's deformity have been suggested as possible causes, neither can be confirmed. In fact, scientists have never been able to determine what the cause of death was for either child. Many an ancient sarcophagus has been discovered in Ukraine over the years, but none quite so special as the sarcophagus of Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Part of the reason why he's known as the Wise is that he founded the first-ever library in Ukraine inside St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv, which is where he's now interred. The cathedral itself was built during his reign during the 12th century, and the sarcophagus has been there ever since, but his body is no longer there. It's believed that it was stolen during the Second World War, although nobody knows who stole it, why they stole it, or what happened to it afterwards. The sarcophagus is one of the things inside the cathedral that's never been damaged or replaced as it was attacked and damaged several times in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. By the 17th century, it needed to almost be completely reconstructed, with work beginning in the 1600s and continuing into the 1700s. The sarcophagus remained intact and untouched throughout the work. Today, the cathedral no longer functions as a church and is instead a museum of the religious history of Ukraine. If you thought that the hand grenade was an invention of the First or Second World War, we have news for you! To discover the origin of the hand grenade, you have to go back a lot further than the 20th century. Try the 7th century instead, which is when Greek fire was used on the enemies of the Byzantine Empire. This ancient hand grenade isn't from the 7th century, it's from the 14th, but we've chosen it because it looks so much like the devices that are used in modern times. The clay grenade is acorn-shaped and even has a hole at the top for a fuse to be inserted. It would have been filled to the top with a flammable liquid and then hurled at enemy ships to cause as much damage as possible. This particular example was found off the coast of Israel in 2016 and is thought to be a leftover from the Crusades. The flammable liquid inside it was probably alcohol, so it wouldn't have been as destructive as the grenades of today, but it would still pose a huge risk to a wooden boat.