20 Historical Mysteries That Got Stranger With New Evidence

Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age man whose mummified body was discovered in the Alps in 1991, had been exhibited for years in museum displays with fair European features. An X-ray revealed an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, indicating that he died after being ambushed about 3300 BC. A 2023 genome analysis revealed that he had genetically dark skin, was probably bald, and was descended almost entirely from early Anatolian farmers, with no evidence of steppe herder ancestry whatsoever.

In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. The treasure hoard inside included an iron dagger near the young pharaoh’s mummy. Egypt had no iron smelting at the time. But X-rays of the blade taken in 2016 and 2022 show high amounts of nickel and cobalt, which can only be found in meteorites. So the iron was mined from a meteorite and hammered into the dagger. It bears the hallmark of smiths in what is now Turkey. Cuneiform tablets from around the time Tutankhamun’s grandfather reigned note that a Mitanni king presented a similar iron dagger as a gift.

In December 1872, the Mary Celeste was discovered drifting off the coast of the Azores. Her captain, Benjamin Briggs, his wife and baby daughter, plus the rest of the ship’s crew were missing. The vessel was carrying over 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol. In 2006, a chemist demonstrated how the vapor escaping from these barrels could suddenly ignite, producing a pressure wave that would not leave burn marks. Perhaps this was why Briggs placed his entire crew on board a small dinghy. The boat disappeared with them.

In February 1959, a group of nine hikers led by Igor Dyatlov died on the side of a mountain in Russia’s Ural range. Their tent had been cut from the inside, several of their bodies had crushed chests, and no evidence of an avalanche was nearby, sparking a range of theories. New research into the slopes they were on, however, shows that wind-packed snow above the tent could have formed a slab avalanche, which wouldn’t have appeared on the surface. The slab snow collapsed, crushing the hikers, and they all died. Animals and time were responsible for the remaining gruesome injuries.

Louis XIV had a secret prisoner, the Man in the Iron Mask, held captive for 34 years, ending in the Bastille, where he died in 1703. According to lore, the masked man was a royal twin. In 2016, a historian discovered the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask by combing through royal correspondence. It wasn’t an iron mask that covered the man’s face, but a simple velvet one. Records show that Eustache Dauger, the man behind the mask, was a servant in a cardinal’s treasurer’s house, a low-level position. If this is true, it’s unclear why the king spent 34 years hiding a nobody, perhaps someone who had merely stolen money.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led a British expedition to the Arctic, hoping to discover a sea passage to Asia. The ships were trapped by the ice, and all aboard perished. For decades, textbooks attributed the expedition’s failure to madness brought on by canned foods sealed with lead solder. However, researchers who analyzed bones from the expedition concluded that lead levels in the crew’s skeletons were no higher than usual, and the true cause of death was starvation and scurvy. In a later breakthrough, DNA testing identified the remains of one of the officers, James Fitzjames. Examination of his jawbone showed cut marks consistent with it having been eaten by starving crew members.

In 1587, Governor John White brought 115 English colonists, men, women, and children, to Roanoke Island, off North Carolina, before returning to England to fetch more supplies. In 1590 he came back to find the settlement deserted, save for the word CROATOAN carved into a wooden post. Years of digging at a site 50 miles inland, marked by a blotch on White’s map, revealed fragments of English pottery and weaponry among indigenous artifacts. This indicates that the colonists moved there and were assimilated.

In 1901, sponge divers hauled a corroded lump of bronze from a Greek shipwreck. For years, it was considered a simple device. But later CT scans showed it had more than 30 interlocking gears, which could predict eclipses, track the planets, and even calculate the date of the Olympic Games. There are inscriptions indicating it came from western Greece, but we still don’t know who built this 2,000-year head start on clockwork.

The dodecahedrons are odd 12-sided bronze objects with knobs at each corner. They’ve been discovered all over northern Roman territory, but there’s no record of them in any known Roman writing. In 2023, archaeologists unearthed a pristine example during digs at Norton Disney, England, where it had been buried in a fourth-century pit. Tests revealed a lead-rich bronze composition, no signs of use, and uneven hole diameters, making it unlikely to have been used for knitting or surveying. What it was used for is still unknown.

In 1864, the Hunley, a Confederate submarine, rammed a spar torpedo into the Union ship Housatonic off the coast of Charleston. It was the first time a submarine sank a warship. Then it disappeared. When the Hunley was raised in 2000, all eight crewmen were still sitting in place on their hand cranks. There were no broken bones and no evidence of panic. A study in 2017 found that an underwater blast wave traveled through the water and the submarine’s iron hull, killing the crew instantly by damaging their lungs as they sat there, their bodies never moving.

In 1948, a corpse was discovered on an Australian shore holding a piece of paper that said: “It is finished.” For years, speculation swirled that he was a Soviet agent. Then, in 2022, DNA extracted from hair on his death mask pointed to the identity of the deceased as Carl Webb, an engineer based in Melbourne who disappeared more than a year before. His former spouse had divorced him on grounds of desertion, and even though his picture appeared in newspapers, no family member reported him as missing.

In June 1924, George Mallory and his young climbing companion Andrew Irvine vanished near the top of Everest, well before the peak was first officially climbed. Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999, revealing that he died in a fall. In 2024, a team found Irvine’s boot and partial remains on a glacier below, nearly a century after he vanished. The pair’s camera, which could reveal if they’d made it to the summit, remains missing.

In 1912, a book dealer purchased a 240-page volume of puzzlingly indecipherable script and bizarre plant illustrations; some people suspected that it was a fake. Radiocarbon dating in 2009 confirmed that the pages date from the early 15th century, and tests on the ink revealed that no draft documents lie hidden beneath the words, confirming the manuscript is genuine. And yet not a single line has been definitively deciphered. Throughout history, the book has puzzled experts, codebreakers, and supercomputers, including wartime cryptographers.

In December 1900, three lighthouse keepers, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur, disappeared without a trace from the remote Scottish islands of the Flannan Isles. Over time, many people claimed that logbooks left behind contained descriptions of weeping and storms of such magnitude that they defied explanation. However, a 2015 study concluded that the entries were likely fabricated more than 12 years later. What investigators did confirm was twisted metal railings and a one-ton chunk of concrete heaved 30 feet up from sea level, suggesting a large rogue wave. The lighthouse keepers’ bodies were never recovered.

When archaeologists unearthed bodies buried in a Chinese desert in the period between 2100 and 1700 BC, some were dressed in woven cloth resembling modern-day tartan and appeared to be non-East Asian. This led researchers to conclude that a population of migrating herders from around the Black Sea had arrived and established themselves in the region. A 2021 genetic analysis found no trace of such ancestry. Rather, the Tarim people descended from an isolated Ice Age population that stayed genetically cut off for thousands of years, even as they adopted the agricultural and textile practices of their neighbors.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it buried the Roman town of Pompeii in ash, preserving the forms of its dead. Those bodies later decomposed and were replaced with plaster by 19th-century archaeologists. One plaster cast, showing two people embracing, was dubbed The Two Maidens and thought to be two women related to each other. In 2017, DNA extracted from a bone inside the plaster revealed that both were male and not related in any way. The relationship between them remains a mystery.

In 1828, a German teenager walked into town and claimed he had spent his entire life living in a dark cellar. He was stabbed to death five years later, in 1833, and people claimed he was a lost prince of Baden who’d been traded for another baby. Previous hair testing had failed to determine the issue, but in 2024, a highly sensitive DNA test on confirmed samples excluded Kaspar Hauser from the royal family’s genetic lines. We still don’t know where he came from or what really happened to him.

The Copper Scroll, found near Qumran in 1952, is unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls in that it was inscribed on copper rather than parchment and describes dozens of hiding places throughout ancient Judea where large amounts of gold and silver were supposedly buried. Tests have verified that the copper is authentic and about 2,000 years old. But the total weight of metal it lists could amount to as much as 100 metric tons, far more than Judea’s economy is thought to have possessed, and no such cache has ever been discovered.

In medieval Bohemia, a monk sentenced to death supposedly created a huge manuscript overnight with the Devil’s help. When tested in 2007, ink and handwriting analysis revealed only one scribe’s hand and a single iron-gall ink used for the whole thing. That proved that one man, working alone, produced it. And at 20 to 30 years, that’s an extraordinary feat of solitary effort! No need for a devil.

The Dancing Plague began in July 1518, when a woman named Frau Troffea started to dance uncontrollably in Strasbourg. Within a month, over 400 others had joined her. Some danced themselves to death. For years, textbooks blamed ergot, a fungus that grows on rye, but in 2008 a medical historian disproved the theory. Ergot causes violent spasms and gangrene, not days of dancing. Instead, he found that widespread famine and disease had left the city’s residents terrified they were being cursed, and they danced to death trying to avoid that fate.

This content was created with the help of AI.