That’s pretty much what Jared Diamond (Author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse reckons happened too.
I’m interested in the failed Norse colonies in Greenland and Vinland. I know there’s a fairly logical explanation for what happened to them (It was fucking cold, they didn’t get on with the locals, and they were trying to subsist on farm animals and crops patently unsuitable for the area). But it interests me to wonder what the Colonists were thinking, wondering why they hadn’t seen their annual Supply Boat this year, and hands up everyone who feels like taking the boats we have left and heading for Markland/Iceland?
The thing is, as much as I enjoy a good mystery, I tend to find myself thinking that most stuff has a rational explanation. Not all of it though, and that’s the fun stuff.
I too am interested in this. i find it hard to belive that a colony that had existed for longer than 10 generations would not be able to adapt. I think they simply moved away, when things got impossibly harsh. Of course, Greenland in AD 1100 was a pretyty nice place0-there were trees and people could grow barley.
We have lots of Minoan artifacts and the Phaistos Disk wouldn’t stand out if it was just an example of their writing. I’ve been led to assume from what I’ve read that the Phasitos Disk does not resemble anything else we know about the Minoans and is believed to be an artifact imported from somewhere else or found by the Minoans, and not Minoan at all, but from some other culture we have no other artifact from. Unless, of course, it’s the work of a lone genius. Is that understanding not true?
I suspect this is less a case of a mystery requiring explanation, than one where it’s not obvious that there was a puzzle in the first place.
While I’ve only read a tiny fraction of the whole literature on the building, a visit to Granada last year meant that I read a stack of books on the Alhambra. And I don’t think I’ve come across this story before, which is surprising since it’s one that would likely have stuck in my memory. For instance, I don’t think it’s in Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alahambra; hardly a reliable source, but this would have been exactly the sort of neat story to appeal to Irving, so its omission is suspicious.
Furthermore, Google suggests that all the online versions of the story only trace back to a 2006 news story about the American Institute of Mathematics plans to build a (somewhat silly) Alhambra-inspired conference centre in California.
Then there’s the snag that what’s believed to be the original plumbing for the fountain survives. The central pillar is in the Alhambra Museum and has exactly the simple arrangement you’d naively expect: a vertical pipe which the water comes up and then radial ones to the lions.
Now there might have been some additional mechanism that’s now missing, but I see no evidence of that.
Granted, there are a couple of complications. Thus there is the suggestion that the fountain isn’t original to the building, but derives from a hypothetical older Jewish palace in the city. And there’s the oft-repeated suggestion that the lions represent the signs of the Zodiac, though this appears to me to be based on nothing more the, otherwise not wildly unlikely, fact that there are twelve of them.
In summary, I suspect the story of the fountain having been a clock was probably made up by a tour guide at some point and then has only been circulating more widely since 2006.
That’s what I’d like to think too, and that’s the logical, sensible explanation. But everything I’ve read on the subject either suggests or says outright that there was surprisingly little sea traffic to/from Greenland and that the King of Norway held the trade monopoly at the time. I just would have figured that when 5,000 Norse settlers from Greenland showed up in Iceland or Norway, someone would have made note of it, or if they went to North America, we would have found more evidence of it than L’anse aux Meadows.
Went there about 3 years ago and there were 3 things that made me scratch my head.
The playa is about 1 mile wide, 2 miles long ( to the best of my recollection ), but the majority of all the rocks are scattered out in the middle. On the west side are some steep hills where the rocks could have rolled down, but not a single trail leading out to where the rocks are located. How the heck did they get out in the middle with no signs of movement along the playa’s edge.
These rocks range in size from a little smaller than a fist to maybe 2-3 ft. wide. hundreds of them.
None of the trails were consistent with any of the other trails. One of the bigger rocks had a trail that went about a hundred straight feet then took a sudden sharp angle to the left and went another fifteen feet and around it were other rocks going off in different directions. All straight lines. And any turns were sharp angled turns.
Very strange
And the most mind-boggling thing was I didn’t have to get my truck’s front end re-aligned after the 52 mile round trip journey on the worst, hard core, washboard dirt road I’ve ever been on.
That seems to have been the predominant opinion in the 1920s, when the field was new. However I believe general consensus now is that the Disk is indeed Minoan in provenance, or at least Cretan. Certainly that was how it was presented to me in my Minoan archaeology course in 2007. I’m sure there are opinions aplenty either way.
One of my PhD supervisor’s was interested in this, he’s actually listed on the Wikipedia references list and quite a few other places to do with Voynich. I never got too heavily into it since I had enough on my plate at the time. Perhaps I should have a look and see if he’s still working on it these days.
There is some evidence for a Norse presence in North America somewhere between the 11th and 14th centuries other than L’anse aux Meadows, like the Kensington, Heavener, and Spirit Pond runestones, or the Maine penny. However, each of those is disputed at best, carrying certain inconsistent traits, as I understand it.
I’m also not seeing the mystery here. There were tons of clocks around by the late 15th Century.
Probably confirmation bias. In Skeptical Inquirer magazine a few years ago, I read about a study to try and find if people could really tell when they were being stared at. Results: same as predicted by chance. Just one study, but the basic idea is silly enough, and the likely explanation (confirmation bias) so reasonable, that I wouldn’t bother putting much more work into it.
Has anyone mentioned the “Baghdad Battery”? Maybe it really was a Galvanic cell 2000 years ago, or maybe something else entirely.
Definitely an amazing world. I’m in favor of that.
I don’t know if there’s any conclusive evidence about the specific archeological find, but Mythbusters tested the concept of an ancient-tech battery and found it plausible.
But they didn’t adress the obvious question : if they really were batteries… what were they used for ? What did they power ? For some reason I don’t buy the idea that they were used to shock church goers into beliving in Og (or Bahamut or whatever god they had in Baghdad at the time).
Well, actually (having just watched this episode again a few days ago), they did prove that it could be used for electroplating, which is one of the most common hypotheses set forward. As a side note, I point out that Adam’s comment (paraphrased) “even if you could cause a slight tingling, it would be scary and make you believe in something” is pretty much how I see it. These were simple people, if you figured out when the next full solar eclipse was going to be and told them that you were going to blot out the sun on such-and-such day – they’d give you god status.
I’ve always been fascinated both with science and para-science, so most of these things that have been posted are things I have read about already. I hadn’t seen the sailing stones, though, that is cool. And Pedro the Mystery Mummy. Totally cool.
Adam and Jamie aren’t the only ones who showed the ancient batteries could be used for electroplating: I vaguely remember watching a tv show about the Baghdad battery and other mysterious devices when I was 7 or so*. The theory presented then was that the battery could be used to electroplate jewelry or other items with gold. I swear I remember them setting up their own, in a kind-of-Bill-Nye/kind-of-infomercial style, and seeing if it would work. I don’t remember what they dipped in to try out, but it was so much like the anti-silver-tarnish commercials that I’m probably getting it mixed up.
