The 10 Greatest Mysteries of All Time
10. What Happened to Alexander the Great’s Tomb?
Alexander the Great, one of the greatest conquerors in history, and a name still admired and revered today. The most amazing thing about the Macedonian King was that he managed to forge an Empire stretching from Europe to Northern India by the age of 33, when unfortunately he succumbed to a fever, thus ending any aspirations of expansion.
After his death he was taken back to ‘his’ city, Alexandria, entombed and then put on public display, in a similar way to both Lenin and Mao. The inheritors of Alexander’s passion for Empire were the Romans. The Emperors, in particular came to regard Alexander as the epitome of bravery, strength and courage. They paid regular trips to Alexandria to pay their respects. It’s widely reputed that Julius Caesar wept when he gazed upon a statue of Alexander while in Spain, and the Roman general Pompey was so obsessed with him, that he searched high and low across the Empire for his cloak, which apparently he discovered and wore as a costume of greatness, and even went as far as to have his hair cut in the same manner. Caligula, the mad Emperor stole Alexander’s armour from his tomb and wore it for luck. If Caligula was considered mad, then Emperor Caracalla who ruled from 211-217 AD was crazy, thinking that he was the reincarnation of Alexander himself. Eventually, in 200 AD, the tomb was closed to the public out of concern for its safety, owing to the ever increasing hordes of tourists. Since then, its whereabouts have become one of the greatest mysteries of all time.
9. What Caused the Extinction of the Megafauna?
Today, we live in an impoverished world in terms of large animals, otherwise known as megafauna. If you want to go and see large numbers of large animals, you must travel to Africa. If you were to look elsewhere, you’d be bitterly disappointed. But it wasn’t always this way; just 50,000 years ago there were big herds of big animal’s right across the planet except Antarctica.
Then, over a very short period many species of megafauna began to go extinct, but why did this happen? Answering this perplexing question is one of the most contentious issues in science today. The intriguing thing about the extinctions is that they seem to coincide with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. Humans colonised Australia 40,000 years ago, shortly afterwards, nearly 1 in 3 of all large animal species disappeared. The Americas were settled 12,000 years ago, and again coincided with a grand erasing of virtually everything larger than a human. Unsurprisingly this circumstantial evidence has led many scientists to point the finger of blame squarely at us. But how could small numbers of humans armed with Stone Age weapons wreak such havoc? Questions like these have led other scientists to theorise that climate was the main cause. For others, neither hunting nor climate is a sufficient enough explanation and in recent times, another theory suggesting that disease wiped them all out has been put forward. Today, most scientists tend to favour a middle ground theory suggesting that a combination of factors including predation from humans was the most likely cause.
8. How did the Nazca People Construct Their Giant Geoglyphs?
Sometime between 300BC and 800AD, the ancient Nazca people were responsible for fashioning what are often described as superhuman depictions of their animal gods. On a 500 square kilometre plateau, these people carved hundreds of perfectly straight lines and geometric patterns by painstakingly brushing the arid sand and grit to one side. The remarkable thing about these depictions is that they only can be glanced at properly from hundreds of feet up, only at such a great height can you see more than seventy enormous pictures of both animals and humans in detail, some are more than 270 metres long.
Back on terra firma, and all you can see are paths in the dust, so how on Earth did these people construct such beautiful and breathtaking works of art without being able to see what they were doing from above. It’s one of the biggest mysteries of all and theories for their purpose range from markers for underground waterways to landing pads for UFOs. A more likely theory is that they served as a means to communicate with the gods; essentially they used the arid ground as a message board, while the night sky, home of their Gods served as their audience.
7. What Caused the First Flowers to Bloom?
Flowers; surely the most delightful things you can possibly look at. There are few other life-forms on this planet that arouse our curiosity quite as much as flowers. But how on Earth did they first evolve? In 1879, Charles Darwin composed a letter to his friend; the botanist Joseph Hooker, stating that he couldn’t understand the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record. Unfortunately, to this day no one has really come up with a decent explanation, which is amazing considering some of the wild theories you often encounter in the scientific world, such as Life arriving on Earth via a meteorite. Yet, some 130 million years ago, the first recognisble flowers suddenly start to show in the fossil record. This is around the start of the Cretaceous Period, which of course ended with the extinction of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The first flowers though bloomed in a world that was dominated by the dinosaurs, but the ancient super continent of Pangaea was now splitting into two separate land masses, Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south, with a big ocean, the Tethys in between.
Some experts though think that flowers are more ancient than supposed, arising as long ago as 250 million years ago, but fossil flowers have never been found from this period. Others think that several evolutionary phases occurred in quick succession, accounting for flowers’ sudden appearance. However, it happened, what can’t be disputed is just how much impact flowers have had on the planet. Without them, life today would be very different. For instance, more than 75 per cent of all the food we eat comes from flowering trees or plants. Once the first blooms appeared, the era of a green, brown and blue Earth was gone forever. Now the planet became red, yellow, orange, purple and pink.
Did the presence of pollinating insects such as bees bring about the evolution of flowers, or did the pollinators only evolve after the first flowers appeared, that’s another little mystery in its own right.
6. Bipedalism in Humans?
Bipedalism or walking on two legs is the one obvious way, apart from our hairlessness that we differ from our great ape relatives. It’s a very odd adaptation it has to be said, with every good advantage, coming with an equally good disadvantage. For example, walking on two legs did free up our hands for carrying food items, but it also slowed us down significantly; not a particularly good thing to happen, considering that we were in the middle of making the transition from living in dense forest to living in open grassland savannah, an environment full of fearsome predators both alive today and long extinct.
It was once thought that the development of large brains brought on the development of bipedalism. But we now know that the first bipeds had brains the same size as chimps; so maybe raising ourselves on to two feet brought an unprecedented growth of the brain? The answer to this is also no, as these early upright hominids known as Australopithecines experienced very little brain growth over several million years. It seems that the brain growth coincided almost exactly with the invention of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago, nearly 4 million years after we first rose up onto two feet.
There are in fact many theories that try to explain the most important physical development in human history, ranging from simply freeing up the hands, to reaching up to feed from low growing savannah vegetation and maybe the most bizarre of all, the idea that we evolved bipedalism through having to wade across flooded areas of rainforest. This is a mystery that is definitely solvable; it just simply needs more evidence before anything of a concrete nature can be established.
