10: Buddha’s Footprint Footprints of the Buddha can be found all
over the world, in temples and mountains, rocks and caves, left as a reminder that Buddha
was once real and present on the earth.
His footprints left a spiritual path for people to follow and now there are physical depressions
in the Earth both natural and carved out by people over the centuries.
Unlike some other deities in some other religions who have never been confirmed as real, Gautama
Buddha was a very real person.
One of the largest Buddha footprints can be found in Sri Lanka, on top of “Sri Pada”
which translates from Sinhalese to “the sacred foot”.
The part scientists have a hard time with is identifying which of these mysterious footprints
was actually left behind by the Buddha himself and which are created by others.
The Japanese author Motoji Niwa spent years tracking down over 3000 Buddhist footprints
throughout Japan, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia.
But it's literally impossible to tell which ones may have been physically left behind
by the Buddha himself.
One of the most famous is a mysterious natural footprint embedded in the rock at Phra Phutthabat
in central Thailand.
Many argue this is the most convincing Buddha footprint in the world, but there's still
no way of knowing who left the giant print behind.
Scientists just don't know.
There's also another massive footprint of the Buddha in Chengzhou, China.
It was made over 1300 years ago, but again scientists can't actually confirm who left
it behind.
The important thing to remember is that these footprints are sacred or magical symbols,
meant to inspire and help you along your spiritual journey.
9: An Ancient Language Scientists are still trying to figure out
how to read the ancient language of the Indus civilization of northern India.
All throughout the ancient Indus Valley, researchers have dug up seals, symbols, thousands of short
inscriptions, and plenty of spectacular characters carved into stone walls.
But after 4000 years, scientists are still stumped when it comes to deciphering them.
It's shocking because scientists have unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphics, we
know how to read ancient Mayan, and even the highly advanced Enigma machine of the Nazis
was decoded in the 1940’s.
Yet the script of the Indus civilization remains undecipherable.
The Indus Valley was a cradle of civilization, located in modern Pakistan and northwest India.
The people of the Indus Valley had massive urban cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.
They practiced urban planning at a 21st century standard.
They were highly advanced, and so it would be invaluable if we could finally decipher
their script and see what kinds of things they were writing down.
People flourished here at around the same time as the ancient Egyptians.
But they vanished far more mysteriously and left very little of themselves behind.
Scientists are still debating the underlying language used in their scripts.
Some say the inscriptions aren't even real writing, but totally unambiguous symbols that
represent a general meaning.
In other words, they could be compared to a bunch of really confusing ancient emojis.
Still, scientists are working tirelessly to decipher the language and discover what’s
written on the thousands of ancient documents.
If we can unlock just a tiny bit we would be able to understand a whole entire world
as seen through the advanced ancient people’s eyes!
8: Shark Teeth in the City of David Scientists in Israel have discovered a bizarre
cache of fossilized shark teeth in a place that makes no sense for them to have been
found.
They discovered the ancient teeth in the City of David, a mysterious archaeological site
in Jerusalem over 2900 years old.
The city is located nearly 100 miles (160.9 km) from where any shark tooth fossil should
be found.
Scientists don’t know for sure how the teeth ended up here, but they do have some rather
good theories.
One of the theories is that someone living in the City of David was an avid collector
of fossils.
Just as modern people collect stones, crystals, shells and fossils today as a hobby, someone
might have been doing the same thing in the Biblical days of King Solomon.
The individual may have traveled closer to the coast to purposely dig up shark teeth
over 80 million years old.
The lead researcher on this project, Dr. Thomas Tuetken, says the fossils were not at their
original site.
They had definitely been moved, meaning they were probably valuable to their owners.
The teeth were found buried in a heap of rubble that was once a person’s basement.
That’s located in what is now a large Palestinian village called Silwan.
The teeth were found along with the bones of fish thrown away as garbage, as well as
some broken scraps of pottery.
It really is quite a mystery.
The teeth belonged to a shark from the Late Cretaceous period that went extinct 66 million
years ago.
They would have had to be dug out of the Negev Desert on purpose.
This means we know where they came from and what animal they belonged to, just not why
they were brought back to the city.
What are your theories?
Was this a personal collection, or high-value items?
Tell me in the comments!
7: The Wolfsegg Iron The Wolfsegg Iron is a small cube that was
discovered in Austria back in 1885.
The cube is a hunk of iron just over 1 pound (.45 kg) in weight.
Four of its sides are flat, while the other two are convex.
To the untrained eye, it looks like any random piece of iron you might dig out of the ground.
But it became famous because it appears to have been purposely shaped into a cube.
That might not be so strange except for the fact it was discovered in a coal seam 20 million
years old.
Scientists originally said the piece of iron probably came from a meteor.
But this was later ruled out as false.
What it really looks like is a piece of cast iron used in mining machinery.
But that doesn't make any sense because it was found stuck in a block of lignite 20 million
years older than the invention of mining.
This object has been mystifying scientists ever since the 19th century.
It was analyzed in 1966 in Vienna.
They found no nickel, chromium, or cobalt.
This ruled out meteoric origin.
The lack of sulfur indicated the mound is not a pyrite.
The only logical explanation scientists have come up with is that it somehow got stuck
in the coal seam before it was found.
But really, it doesn’t explain how it was locked in the block of lignite.
Some believe the Wolfsegg Iron could be a piece of lost machinery from an ancient civilization
that lived on the planet millions of years before humans ever evolved.
And now for number 6, but first it’s shout out time!
Lord Macleod and JUPITER
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discoveries!!
6: Skull Helmets 2100 years ago, a pair of babies were buried
in what is today Ecuador.
The strange part about this particular burial is that the babies were buried with the most
unusual headgear you've likely ever heard of.
They had the skulls of other deceased children over their own heads like helmets.
Scientists have no idea why, and they don't even have a good guess to explain this bizarre
practice.
The biggest problem with this disturbing discovery is that it's the only one of its kind.
Children’s skulls being used as mortuary headgear has never been seen practiced by
any culture in the world.
There are plenty of weird graves on this planet, but this is the only one with skull helmets.
The kids were part of the Guangala culture.
They were found during excavations in 2014 that revealed 11 other burials.
There were eight infants, two adults, and one child.
They were buried with pretty ordinary grave goods, except for the headgear.
Sara Juengst, an anthropologist from the University of North Carolina, called it a Mortuary tradition
without known parallels.
One of the infants died at 18 months old.
Their helmet was made from the skull of a child who died between the ages of four and
twelve.
It was the same thing for the other child.
Plus, markings suggest the headgear was crafted at the same time the children died.
They were form fitting, cut perfectly to be snug around the infants’ heads.
Scientists have no idea what's going on.
5: The Valley of Headless Men The Nahanni Valley in Canada’s Northwest
Territories is considered one of the last unexplored places on the planet.
It's over 311 miles (500 km) from the closest city and looks like what the rest of the world
may have been like before humans.
It's difficult to reach, and it's a place of scientific intrigue.
To the local tribes, the Nahanni Valley is called the Valley of Headless Men.
The Dene tell tales of a warrior tribe who lived high in the mountains and came down
into the lowlands to kill.
They were greatly feared by the Dene – until they vanished mysteriously and were never
seen again.
They just stopped raiding, none of their camps were ever found, almost as though they had
evaporated.
While this could easily be mistaken for Native American legend, modern mysteries make it
seem a little bit more like fact than fiction.
A pair of brothers looking for gold canoed up the river into the valley and vanished
in 1906.
Two years later, a search party discovered their skeletons at their camp, both headless.
It seemed they had been decapitated while asleep.
Before the search team left, one of their companions went missing and was never found.
Scientists don't know what kind of monsters lurk here.
Ever since records began, there have been stories of corpses being discovered, cabins
burning to the ground, and people completely vanishing.
Almost anyone who goes into the Valley of the Headless Men is never seen again.
4: Ancient Shoe Print A shoe print was discovered on a lump of coal
200 million years old.
It was found by an employee of the Nevada Mining Company named Albert E. Knapp.
It was January of 1917 when Albert found the piece of coal in a limestone deposit from
the Triassic period.
It appeared to show the heel of a shoe, but only the heel.
No toes, no divots or grooves on the bottom – just the smooth underside of someone’s
heel.
In March of 1922, the New York Times reported the heel would fit well with a young boy of
10 or 12.
It also appeared to have a line of stitches moving along the outside edge of the sole.
There is no doubt the imprint is of a modern shoe.
But how did it get stuck in the piece of coal?
This is another one of those weird things scientists can't explain.
Most experts believe it’s either a misunderstanding or a hoax, because there's just no way to
explain a 200-million-year-old footprint. 3: Cave of Bones
The Cave of Bones in Malta was occupied by ancient humans more than 2000 years before
the pyramids or Stonehenge were ever even concepts.
The cave contains the first evidence of human beings settling on the Maltese islands.
12,000 years ago during the Ice Age, Malta was connected to Sicily by land.
But when the Ice Age ended, the water started to rise, and eventually Malta became an island.
Before that happened, Europeans had settled the area.
They wandered into the Maltese caves, made their homes, and didn't bother to leave when
the water started to rise.
But here's what scientists are confused about.
Inside the mysterious Cave of Bones, archaeologists have found things other than just human remains.
They've also discovered the remains of animals of the pygmy variety.
They've found pygmy elephants and dwarf hippopotamuses, along with the bones of extraordinarily small
wolves, bears, deer, and foxes.
Scientists can't explain what caused all the animals of Malta to be so small.
Their best guess is that once Malta became an island, there was a sudden lack of food
and predators.
The lack of resources meant the animals evolved over time to need less, and they all started
to shrink over thousands of years.
But of course, this is just one theory.
2: Unexplained Coming & Going In the Jebel Qurma region of Jordan, which
is basically just a barren desert on the border of Saudi Arabia, there are some rather strange
burials.
The graves date back to the Bronze Age, yet some were made as recently as the Byzantine
period.
Archaeologists never bothered to systematically analyze them until just recently.
And what we now know is that this region of the desert was abandoned, then resettled over
and over in an endless cycle for the past 4000 years.
Scientists have no idea why people were coming and going from this one spot.
Sadly, almost all the tombs have been pillaged already, leaving archaeologists little to
go on.
They believe people made their homes in secluded areas at the foot of the desert, then buried
the elite members of the society on the summits of barren hills.
But for that matter very little remains of any potential settlements.
The few remains archaeologists have found show a spotty pattern of habitation.
People abandoned the desert in the third millennium BC, then didn't come back until the first
millennium.
The people who did come back were different, building slightly different burial heaps and
including different grave goods.
1: A Medieval Murder Weapon In Bulgaria, archaeologists have come across
a ring with a strange cavity in it that they say could have been used for murder.
The deputy director of Bulgaria's National Archaeological Museum believes the cavity
in the ring was used to hide poison, with that poison being used in political assassinations
in medieval times.
The ring is fashioned of bronze, it's at least 600 years old, and it was found during excavations
at ruins in Cape Kailakra.
This is where aristocrats lived in the 14th century.
Its craftsmanship is exquisite, likely crafted in either Italy or Spain.
Researchers aren't too sure.
They say the ring was probably worn on the pinky finger of a man’s right hand.
The hole was in such a position that it would have allowed the wearer to sneak poison into
a glass of wine by merely flicking their finger.
What scientists don't know is who may have been assassinated by the wearer of the ring.
They think it could be linked to a noble named Dobrotitsa, who ruled in the first part of
the 14th century, but they don't know for sure.
Do you really think this ancient ring was used for assassinations?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and thanks a lot for watching.
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