Let's face it: we humans are obsessed with our planet's past.
Whether we're talking ancient, out-of-place artifacts or potentially extra-terrestrial
presences in classic paintings, we love digging deeper into yesteryear in search of something
strange.
And there's nothing stranger - or older - than fossils.
Whip out your amateur archeology kit and get your head-scratching finger ready, because
we're about to check out some of the weirdest, most bizarre fossils that science still can't
explain.
Homo Floresiensis
When an Australian-Indonesian team discovered the fossils of a small hominid in 2003, they
knew they had unearthed new mysteries and questions about the human family.
Indeed, their discovery, named homo floresiensis, has forced researchers to rethink human history
and the place of modern humans in it.
The hominid was diminutive, with samples averaging only a little over 3 feet tall, with big feet.
Researchers began calling them Hobbits - for obvious reasons.
So far, homo floresiensis has only been found on one island in Indonesia, and records indicate
they lived as recently as 50,000 years ago.
Since the Hobbits are so close in timeline to our own species, researchers are utterly
baffled by them.
Some contend that it's a totally separate species from humans.
This completely flies in the face of the old consensus that Homo sapiens were the only
hominid species remaining when they took over the world.
Others believe that the Hobbits were actually Homo sapiens who settled on Indonesia and,
over centuries of inbreeding, developed dwarfism.
Oddly, it seems like the second option has captured more steam among researchers, though
if anybody digs up a shiny gold ring and dubs it their precious, all bets are off.
"My precious!
AHHHH!"
Conrad's skull
Around 360 million years ago, Earth entered the Carboniferous Period , when carbon and
swamps covered large parts of the land.
While many plants and fish were beginning to resemble their modern brethren during this
period, no hominid samples have been traced back to that era.
Except for one - a mysterious skull found by Ed Conrad.
Conrad discovered the skull in Pennsylvannia in 1981.
The skull was in an area of prehistoric coal, indicative of the Carboniferous Era.
The skull had the same normal features of a human skull, but with one major complication:
there was no evidence that hominids existed in the Carboniferous Era.
After doing more research on the skull, Conrad dated it as roughly 280 million years old.
Suffice it to say, mainstream science did not support his claim, citing the whole "no
humanoids back then" factoid.
In 2011, however, a study from Taiwan concluded that Conrad's fossil was, in fact, a human
skull.
Oddly enough, the story was picked up by creationists to show that Darwin was wrong when dating
human life, though they seem unwilling to admit that this also means that a Biblical
interpretation of the origins of life - that the world and everything in it is only 6000
years old - is also false.
The Nampa Image
Most people don't think of Idaho as a hotspot for archaeological mysteries, but it's actually
the home of a perplexing figure that remains unexplained to this day.
The figure was dug up in 1889 when workers were digging a well in Nampa, Idaho, right
outside of Boise.
Resembling a human doll, but made of stone, the inch-and-a-half-long figure was buried
320 feet below the surface of the Earth.
"The Nampa Image is so small that if you test it, it's going to have to be destroyed."
The rock around the doll was determined to be from two million years ago, far before
any hominid made it to Idaho.
This was also millions of years before Homo sapiens or comparable species walked the Earth,
period.
Paleontologists assume that only Homo sapiens have the ability for this sort of workmanship,
but they only appeared 200,000 years ago.
Here is a stone doll that was at least a million and a half years older, with ornate designs
that were clearly carved by hand.
This was certainly created by ancient humans that should not have existed at the time.
So, how did it get in the rock?
Of course, skeptics have proposed a variety of theories, but to this day, the doll's origins
remain unexplained.
If it is evidence of ancient humans in Idaho, it would completely rewrite the evolutionary
timeline of humanity, showing that Homo sapiens - or a currently unknown, comparable species
- existed way before we expected it.
UC Riverside's mysterious circles
"Hi.
Welcome to the University of California Riverside half-billion-year-old problem."
In 1986, scientists at the University of California-Riverside found a mysterious rock covered with strange
circles in Wisconsin, dated back to when the state was covered in water.
Scientists studied the weird rock for awhile and then, stumped, filed it away as an unsolved
mystery.
Jump forward to 2015, and the fossil was still a mystery.
Nobody could explain what could make perfect circles in the sea bed 450 million years ago.
At a complete loss of ideas, UC Riverside scientists did something that scientists rarely
do: They opened it up to the internet and asked Reddit users to propose theories.
Ideas ranged from sarcastic to shockingly well-thought out.
Some theorized that these were the work of prehistoric snails.
Others though that jellyfish or sea sponges could have caused the shape.
Unfortunately - and as expected - none of the theories perfectly fit.
All we know is what we already knew: 450 million years ago, something was making perfect circles
on the seafloor in Wisconsin.
Our guess?
Well …
Homo naledi
In 2015, researchers in South Africa found hominid fossils that didn't relate to any
of the known hominid fossil families.
Named Homo naledi, the fossils were from a new family of human predecessors.
Homo naledi fossils occupy a weird place in the human family tree, falling between hominids
and apes.
This has led some researchers to propose that they're not truly hominids, but instead some
sort of evolutionary middle child that defies classification.
Oddly, the specimen was less than a 350,000 years old, meaning it lived right before Homo
sapiens appeared.
Even stranger, all of the fossils were found in a large burial hole.
Whether this mass grave was ritualistic in nature is still up for debate.
All of this adds up to a puzzling picture, especially when you consider that this species
might have survived up until the development of Homo sapiens.
This means that our ancestors probably had contact with small-brained hominids, contrary
to what was previously thought, forcing us to re-evaluate the timeline of human development.
The Atacama 'alien'
There's no denying this one's weird enough to make the most determined alien denier stop
and rethink their position.
"You don't honestly believe this is some kind of an extra-terrestrial?"
According to the New York Times, a 6-inch-long skeleton was discovered in a Chilean ghost
town in 2003.
It was eventually dubbed "Ata," after the Atacama Desert in which it was found.
Despite looking vaguely human, the mummy boasted its fair share of odd features.There's the
pointed skull, the giant eye sockets, two missing ribs, and the eerily diminutive size.
Surely, that's all the proof you need that aliens are real, right?
The tiny mummy provided some serious fuel for believers, but in 2018, scientists revealed
that they'd solved part of the puzzle.
The mummy's DNA confirmed she is very human, and she's even a local.
But researchers from Stanford University kept digging, and got more questions than answers.
Initially thought to be ancient, scientists eventually determined the remains were only
around 40 years old.
They also found that, while her appearance suggested she may have been was born prematurely,
her bone structure was as developed as that of a 6-year-old.
She also had a shocking number of genetic mutations, a list that included variants linked
to things like dwarfism and scoliosis.
But the list also contained mutations that scientists were confused by - in all, 54 rare
mutations that possibly describe diseases and conditions modern science has never seen
and can't explain.
So Ata isn't an alien, but it might be less weird if she were.
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