Record · Ancient world · South Asia
Why can't anyone read the Indus script?
About 4,000 Indus texts survive, averaging five signs, with no bilingual text and no agreed language, so no decipherment has been accepted since the 1870s.
· 2500 BCMysteries & discoveries
Articles about mysteries & discoveries across every continent and era, oldest first.
Record · Ancient world · East Asia
Is Erlitou China's first dynasty, or a city no one can name?
Erlitou in Henan has palaces, a bronze foundry and grid roads from about 1900 to 1500 BC, and no writing to say whether its rulers were the Xia.
· 1700 BC
Record · Classical world · The Americas
How big was Teotihuacan, and who ran it?
Teotihuacan covered eight square miles and held 100,000 people or more by AD 400, yet no portrait or tomb of a king has been found. Its rulers are unknown.
· AD 200
Record · Classical world · The Americas
How did the Nazca draw figures they could never see whole?
They cleared dark stones off the desert to expose pale ground, scaling up small designs; near-zero rain kept the lines intact for about 2,000 years.
· AD 200
Record · Medieval world · Africa
Who built Great Zimbabwe, and why was the answer buried?
Ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe between about 1100 and 1450. Excavations proved it in 1905 and 1929; Rhodesia censored that finding until 1980.
· 1300
Record · Medieval world · Europe
Where did the Black Death start? Tombstones near Issyk-Kul
Ancient DNA from graves dated 1338 near Lake Issyk-Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, put the Black Death's source strain at the root of the plague family tree.
· 1347
Record · Medieval world · Oceania
Did the moai of Rapa Nui walk? What the 2012 experiment showed
In 2012 Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo rocked a 5-ton replica moai upright with 18 people and three ropes. The road statues, the forest debate and the 1860s.
· 1400