Articles about mysteries & discoveries across every continent and era, oldest first.
John White found the word CROATOAN carved on a post at Roanoke in 1590, three years after his 1587 colonists, including newborn Virginia Dare, vanished.
· 1587Quiros's fleet entered a bay in Vanuatu on May 1, 1606, named the land Australia del Espiritu Santo; a storm later parted his ship from Torres's.
· 1606An orphan sale at Alkmaar on February 5, 1637, raised about 90,000 guilders for tulip bulbs. Krelage, Garber, Goldgar and Thompson trace what happened before and after.
· 1637Letters from Ram Singh's staff, a Mughal chronicle of 1710 and a Maratha bakhar give Shivaji's 1666 escape from Agra different dates and routes home.
· 1666Rawlinson copied the Behistun inscription between 1835 and 1847; in 1857 four sealed translations of one Assyrian text tested the decipherment.
· 1847Calvert began digging Hisarlık in 1863; its nine layers span 3,000 years. Hittite texts name Wilusa, and in 2001 Korfmann and Kolb fought over its size.
· 1871On December 3, 1872, George Smith, self-taught in cuneiform, told a society what a Nineveh tablet said: a flood, a ship, a dove, a swallow, a raven.
· 1872Ordek forgot a spade at a Lop Nor ruin in March 1900. Going back for it, he found a second site that 1901's documents named Loulan, a Han-era kingdom.
· 1900A 2018 NASA workshop put the 1908 Tunguska blast at 10-20 megatons at 10 km. A 2025 paper traces its 80 million trees figure to an unsourced 1930s guess.
· 1908Carter's journal for November 26, 1922 records his answer to Lord Carnarvon: "Yes, it is wonderful." The famous "wonderful things" is from his 1923 book.
· 1922A Bedouin shepherd found seven scrolls in a Qumran cave in 1947. A 1954 Wall Street Journal advertisement offered four of them for sale.
· 1947
