20 Creepy Historical Mysteries Solved By Modern Science

For decades, the strange deaths of nine hikers at Kholat Syakhl in 1959 seemed almost too bizarre to blame on something as ordinary as snow. The hikers’ tent was slashed open from the inside, and some hikers were found with severe internal injuries, but no signs of wounds in the skin. In 2021, physics researchers Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin ran simulations that indicated that cutting into the slope likely released a small, delayed snow slab that happened to fall when the hikers were asleep.

A 1991-discovered burial site, with two bodies unaccounted for, fueled a lasting legend that Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, had survived. This legend persisted until a second grave was found in 2007 and tested. In 2009, using living relatives, including Prince Philip, for comparison, geneticist Michael Coble analyzed both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to confirm that the remains of Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children had all been found, confirming that no one survived the July 1918 execution in Yekaterinburg.

Ötzi the Iceman, who died in roughly 3300 BC, was discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps by hikers. His body was remarkably preserved. When radiologist Paul Gostner X-rayed the body in 2001, the CT scans revealed the remains of a flint arrowhead buried in his left shoulder, which severed the subclavian artery and caused massive internal bleeding. The recent scans also revealed wounds on his hands suggesting he struggled in self-defense.

In 2019, a genomic study led by Niraj Rai examined 38 skeletons from a ring of hundreds around a 16,500-foot-high Himalayan lake. DNA analysis revealed two distinct populations: those of South Asian ancestry who met their end around 800-900 AD and those of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry who died around 1800 AD. Both groups died from giant hailstones, but roughly a millennium apart, complicating previous interpretations of the remains, first discovered in 1942, as belonging to a 9th-century pilgrimage group wiped out in a single storm.

In 1925, Howard Carter removed an iron dagger from the wrappings of Tutankhamun’s body and although the object hadn’t rusted, it was still a mystery because as far as we know, Egyptian iron smelting had barely begun by the time Tutankhamun died ca. 1323 BC. X-ray fluorescence tests performed in 2016 by Daniela Comelli’s team revealed that this mystery object contained high levels of nickel and cobalt consistent with the Kharga meteorite.

The Piltdown Man was claimed to be the missing link between apes and early humans, but ended up being exposed as a fake evolutionary link. The identity of the person behind the hoax remained a mystery until 2016. Isabelle De Groote’s team applied micro-CT scanning and DNA analysis to the Piltdown bones, revealing that each of the specimens was stained and stuffed with the same kind of gravel and held together with the same kind of dental putty. Since all the teeth came from a single orangutan, and all the bone from a batch of medieval human skeletons, this pointed to Charles Dawson as the sole forger, the only person known to have had access to all the specimens.

The RAF officially credited pilot Roy Brown with shooting down the Red Baron, German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, on April 21, 1918. But a recent re-examination of The Red Baron’s autopsy showed that the bullet wound that caused his death in the skies over France entered his chest on the right side and traveled through his heart upward and to the left. This means it couldn’t have come from Brown, who was behind and to the left of Richthofen. The trajectory suggests the shot came from the ground, most likely Australian ground gunner Sgt. Cedric Popkin. Looks like the RAF may have given the credit to the wrong guy!

In 1990, a grave known as JB55 was excavated in Griswold, Connecticut. In 2019, DNA testing conducted by Parabon NanoLabs and AFDIL revealed the deceased was John Barber, a farmer who suffered from severe tuberculosis, as evidenced by his skeletal remains. Barber had wasted away and coughed up blood from tuberculosis, and, during a 19th-century panic, terrified neighbors had rearranged his bones after death into the shape of a skull-and-crossbones to keep him from draining the life from his living relatives.

Sir John Franklin left in May 1845 with 129 men, heading toward the Northwest Passage aboard his ships, the Erebus and the Terror. None of them returned. The ships became trapped in the ice close to King William Island. Starvation and ice doomed the crew, with lead poisoning from the tin cans, caused by inadequate solder, a significant contributor. Cut-marks on human remains indicated that the surviving crew resorted to cannibalism. In 2024, the identity of Captain James Fitzjames was confirmed by DNA. His jawbone had cut marks on it from his own crew.

Archaeologists originally discovered ‘Unknown Man E’ back in 1881 at Deir el-Bahari. His jaw was open, so he was nicknamed ‘the screaming mummy.’ In 2012, researchers led by archaeologist Zahi Hawass examined his remains and found that his jaw had simply dropped when he died. DNA tests confirmed that Unknown Man E and Ramesses III shared 50% of their DNA, identifying the screaming mummy as Prince Pentawer, Ramesses’s son. The prince wasn’t mummified like the others because he was convicted of treason and ordered to commit suicide by hanging. CT scans showed that Ramesses had been slit in the throat as part of a conspiracy within the palace.

In 2019-2020, NASA scientists, including Mark Boslough, ran supercomputer simulations that revealed the mystery behind the Tunguska event. On June 30, 1908, a huge explosion leveled around 830 square miles of forest near Siberia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River, but no impact crater was ever found. The simulations confirmed that a stony asteroid between 50 and 80 meters wide traveling at 33,000 miles an hour exploded just five to ten kilometers above the ground, and the resulting shockwave caused all of the damage.

An Iron Age man found in Denmark’s Bølling Fen in 1950 died by hanging around 400 BC, micro-CT scans of the neck area showed. A braided leather rope was found around his neck, and a study led by Nina H. Nielsen analyzed his gut contents, concluding that the man ate barley porridge that contained knotweed seeds, flax and fish in his final meal that took place between 12 and 24 hours before his death.

The warship Vasa sank on August 10, 1628, less than a mile from Stockholm harbor and took some 30 victims with it. A light breeze caused the ship to tilt and water flooded into the open gun ports. But why was so little breeze enough to sink it? Well, when it was salvaged in 1961, modern technology like 3D laser scanning and modeling revealed the culprit: an extra deck of heavy bronze cannons added at King Gustavus Adolphus’ demands left the vessel top-heavy and without sufficient ballast to stay afloat.

The Pantheon has stood for about 2,000 years and has outlasted most modern concrete. But what is the secret? According to a January 2023 MIT study led by Admir Masic, the Romans used a process called hot mixing in which quicklime was mixed directly with water and volcanic ash, creating small, reactive lime clasts that were spread throughout the mortar. When cracks form, water can seep in and dissolve the lime clasts, forming new crystals of calcium carbonate to plug the cracks in the material.

The 4th-century Roman Lycurgus Cup has a strange trick: it appears green under reflected light but glows red when lit from within. In 1990, researchers David Barber and Ian Freestone discovered under an electron microscope that the glass contains gold-silver alloy nanoparticles, 50 to 100 nanometers in width, made up of approximately 70% silver and 30% gold, with a trace of copper. The nanoparticles scatter green light and let red light pass through, explaining the cup’s dramatic color change. What’s crazy is that nanoparticles weren’t even known when the cup was made. The Romans were casually playing with nanotechnology about 1,600 years early!

Delhi’s 6-ton, 23-foot Iron Pillar has spent roughly 1,600 years exposed to the elements without rusting away. King Chandragupta II had the pillar erected around 400 AD, but the reason for its unusual resistance to rust wasn’t understood until much later. In 2002, R. Balasubramaniam studied Delhi’s Iron Pillar using electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. He discovered that high phosphorus content (a byproduct of the charcoal used to smelt the iron), combined with moisture in the air, produces a thin coating of a compound called misawite. This coating serves to prevent further oxidation. Ancient Indian ironworkers had rust prevention figured out long before the rest of us started buying cans of WD-40.

When divers pulled a mysterious corroded object from a Roman-era shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, Greece, in 1901, they had no idea they had found what would later be called an ancient astronomical computer. The mechanism was built to track astronomical positions and predict eclipses. It also mapped the four-year cycle of the Olympic Games. The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project started scanning the object in 2006 using high-resolution X-ray micro-CT scanning and identified over 30 sophisticated gears and tiny Greek text within the original bronze, which dates from about 150 to 100 BC. Not bad for a computer built about 2,000 years before anyone had to worry about forgetting their password.

How do boulders weighing up to 700 pounds, found on Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, move around leaving long winding trails in their wake? Richard Norris and James Norris found out in August 2014. With the aid of GPS and time-lapse photography, they saw the process firsthand. The rare rain forms a thin layer of water on the playa. At night the water freezes. During the day the sun cracks the ice into sheets that float into the rocks, nudging the rocks along a few meters at a time.

In 1911, Griffith Taylor observed a red waterfall flowing out of Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. The mystery of the source of this red water was solved in 2022 when Elizabeth Carr discovered it comes from a hypersaline lake sealed under 400 meters of ice for 1.5 million years. Using high-resolution electron microscopy, Carr found bacteria living without oxygen by feeding on iron and sulfate. The lake water contains tiny iron-rich particles that instantly turn red upon exposure to air.

What killed all eight crewmen aboard the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley remained a mystery for more than a century. The Hunley sank on Feb. 17, 1864, after torpedoing the USS Housatonic, and never returned. When the submarine was finally raised in 2000, the crew’s remains were found at their hand-crank stations with no sign of attempted escape and no broken bones. But in 2017, researcher Rachel Lance performed blast experiments using scale models, showing that the torpedo’s shockwave traveled through the hull and killed the men via blast lung trauma. They apparently never even had the chance to escape.

This content was created with the help of AI.