Others offer a completely different explanation. “The experts can say whatever they want,” says Suri Tuki, a Rapanui man. “But we know the truth. The statues walked.” According to Rapanui religious beliefs, a spiritual force animated the moai. Surprisingly, Tuki’s proclamation may actually be the answer scientists have been searching for all these years.
In 2012, Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii, and Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at California State University at Long Beach, conducted an experiment in which they “walked” a 5-ton (4,536 kg) replica moai on a dirt road in Hawaii using only ropes and manpower. People holding ropes attached to the forehead of the faux moai stood on opposite sides of the road and rocked the statue forward and back, inching it down the path. A third group of movers positioned behind the moai used a rope to keep the statue leaning a bit forward, without falling.
The team moved the statue 330 feet (100 m) in 40 minutes, suggesting to Lipo that an experienced group of Rapanuians could transport a typical moai from quarry to resting place in about two weeks. The researchers theorized that the builders carved the statues with a curved bottom, to allow an easy rocking motion. The bottom was flattened once the figures arrived at the stone platform, called ahu, on which the statues were stood upright.
Not all researchers, however, agree on the “walking” theory, citing Rapa Nui’s rugged, hilly terrain. Even the island’s roads, they say, were bumpy and uneven. Finally, the statue that the Hunt-Lipo team moved would have been a small-sized moai, leaving doubters to question whether the “walking” method could work for a much larger statue.
What Happened to the Neanderthals?
A quarter of a million years ago, our distant ancestors left Africa and evolved into the ancient humans we know today as Neanderthals. They fanned out across what is now Southern Europe and Central Asia and remained there for 200,000 years.
Yet despite eons at the top of the food chain, the most up-to-date fossil record indicates that Homo neanderthalensis went extinct over a relatively short period of time, between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago. Where did they all go?
It seems that our most direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, replaced the Neanderthals, but it’s not entirely clear why or how. The dominant theory is that H. sapiens were simply more fit for their climate and biome thanks to superior evolution. For instance, studies of the craniums of Neanderthals indicate that their brains were better tuned to locomotion and night vision at the expense of higher-level thinking. This would have put them at a distinct disadvantage when it came to hunting in groups, planning ahead, and developing innovations such as using a spear or bow and arrow. Though competitive exclusion can explain the downfall of the Neanderthals, it cannot explain the abruptness of their extinction. Why were the Neanderthals suddenly so uncompetitive after eons of dominating their landscape? Climate change might provide the answer. During the last ice age, slow-moving, large mammals became scarcer in Eurasia. A shift in game populations toward faster-moving, smaller mammals would have advantaged the swifter Homo sapiens.
Or perhaps the competition was more violent. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, hypothesizes a much darker end for the Neanderthals. We know what happens when more technologically advanced civilizations invade the lands of another people: The newcomers slaughter the established population, first with weapons, then through disease. If Neanderthal-era Eurasia were anything like the pre-Columbian Americas, the Neanderthal extinction would have been violent as well as abrupt.
Even while H. sapiens were outcompeting their less-advanced cousins, Neanderthals managed to live on—in a way. Recent analysis of the Neanderthal genome indicates there was probably some interbreeding between the two species around 60,000 years ago. While not enough to explain the entire disappearance of the Neanderthals (there isn’t enough similarity in our genomes for Homo sapiens to have absorbed the entire species), it does mean that we’re more like our primitive cousins than we once believed.
The doomsday argument (da) utilizes probability reasoning to predict humankind’s prospects for survival.
Is the Doomsday Argument for Real?
A Swedish philosopher and professor at Oxford, Nick Bostrom has written extensively on the Doomsday Argument. Let’s take a look at his explanation.
Consider two contrasting hypotheses: The first, “Doomsday Early,” proposes “humankind goes extinct in the next century and the total number of humans that will have existed is, say, 200 billion.” The second hypothesis, “Doomsday Late,” proposes that “humankind survives the next century and goes on to colonize the galaxy; the total number of humans is, say, 200 trillion.”
But how do we know to which end of the continuum— from pessimistic to hopeful—humanity belongs? Using mathematical probability, we might be able to determine an answer if we knew the number of our birth rank, a number that calculates the number of humans who have ever lived and where we are on that continuum—and we have a good idea of this.
Bostrom calculates roughly 60 billion humans have lived on Earth. Based on this figure, probability should help us conclude that we are likely to be a member of the smaller group, 200 billion. From this, we can reason the Doomsday Early hypothesis is likely true—that is, given our birth rank, it is highly unlikely there will exist 200 trillion humans. “From seemingly trivial premises it [DA] seeks to show that the risk that humankind will go extinct soon has been systematically underestimated,” says Bostrom.
The Doomsday Argument has come under intense scrutiny from the scientific and philosophic communities, “yet no one refutation seems to have convinced many people,” says Bostrom. It may be unlikely that the Doomsday Argument becomes reality in your lifetime, but if the DA is true, what does it reveal about the future? Scientists urge that we should not simply give up all hope “because we’re doomed anyway,” but rather make more urgent efforts to reduce threats to human survival, such as nuclear war, disease, and global warming. Humanity’s life expectancy could also increase if humans evolved into a more advanced species, something “other” than human beings, but that assumes we have enough time left to develop the technology to make that happen. It is also possible that the population of Earth declines in the next century, which would change our birth rank. The elements of the Doomsday Argument remain fluid, but the compelling nature of the argument makes it such that study will continue on it in the years to come.
Why Can’t the Voynich Manuscript Be Deciphered?
Polish antique book collector Wilfrid Voynich was convinced he hit the jackpot when he purchased a highly unusual manuscript in Italy in 1912. It was written in a strange script and profusely illustrated with images of plants, the cosmos and zodiac, and naked women cavorting in bathing scenes. Voynich himself acknowledged the difficult task that lay ahead: “The text must be unraveled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.”
The Voynich manuscript is a codex written on vellum sheets, measuring 9¼ inches (23.5 cm) by 4½ inches (11.2 cm). The codex is composed of roughly 240 pages, with a blank cover that does not indicate a title or author. The text consists of “words” written in an unknown “alphabet” and arranged in short paragraphs. Many researchers say the work seems to be a scientific treatise from the Middle Ages, possibly created in Italy. The time frame, at least, seems correct: In 2009, the Voynich manuscript was carbon-dated to 1404–1438.
There’s only one problem: The contents of the book are a complete mystery—and not a single word of it can be understood.
The enigma of the manuscript certainly isn’t due to a lack of research and careful study. The text had already been analyzed for many decades before Voynich purchased it. Once in possession of the codex, Voynich embarked on a brisk campaign to have its text deciphered, supplying photocopies to several experts. Since then, dozens of cryptographers and linguists have tried and failed to crack the code and decipher its base language. Astronomers, historians, chemists, mathematicians, and scores of laypeople have also proposed solutions, but
none has shed any light on what the text says. Botanists, however, have identified many of the plant species as New World or European.
Indeed, the Voynich manuscript may actually contain no meaningful content, possibly because it was a deliberate deception on the part of its author or because its meaning became muddled in the writing process. In 2007, Austrian mathematician Andreas Schinner claimed the manuscript may have been created by “an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head.”
To this day, scholarship, speculation, and debate over the meaning of the Voynich manuscript continue unabated. Among recent theories are that the manuscript was written by a young Leonardo da Vinci or by Cornelius Drebbel, a 17th-century chemist and optics developer, in collaboration with English philosopher Francis Bacon, which would put the carbon dating calculations into question. Another theory suggests the document originated with the Aztecs in Central America.
And of course, there is the possibility that the manuscript is a hoax.
Is the Antikythera Mechanism the World’s First Analog Computer?
In 1901, divers exploring the remains of an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, northwest of Crete, recovered a bizarre-looking mechanical object that baffled the international scientific community.
The mysterious device, found in 82 fragments heavily encrusted with corrosion, is composed of 30 bronze gear wheels covered with Greek inscriptions. Decades of scientific examination revealed that the ancient device, called the Antikythera mechanism, is an analog computer—the world’s first—designed to calculate the position of heavenly bodies, predict eclipses, and even pinpoint the dates of the Olympic Games.
In 2014, James Evans, professor of physics at the University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at the University of Quilmes, Argentina, published an article in the Archive for History of Exact Science claiming that the mechanism was timed to begin in 205 B.C.E., establishing the device to be as many as 100 years older than most researchers thought. The incredibly complex machine was engineered and built by ancient Greeks, although “it’s probably safer not to try to hang it on any one particular famous person,” according to Evans. The researchers believe the mechanism was designed on Babylonian arithmetic principles adopted by the Greeks.
The front dial of the mechanism features two concentric scales that represent the movement of the twelve zodiac constellations in the sky. The outer ring is marked with the months of the 365-day Egyptian calendar in Greek letters, while the inner ring is marked with the Greek symbols of the zodiac. The rear face of the mechanism includes numerous dials believed to predict lunar and solar eclipses. The mechanism was operated by turning a small crank that was linked to the largest gear on the front dial.
In 2012, in an exhaustive study of the Antikythera mechanism, researchers Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones concluded that the device is “the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t really work very well!” The researchers attributed the mechanism’s lack of exactness to its imprecise mechanical engineering and the inaccurate mathematical and celestial theories of the time.
To date, no other ancient machine like the Antikythera mechanism has been found. The story behind this ancient marvel of engineering has been long lost to time.
What Caused the Decline of the Mayan Civilization?
The collapse of the Mayan civilization at the end of the so-called classic period, between 200 and 900, is a persistent archaeological mystery.
The classical Maya were the most advanced of the pre-Columbian civilizations, anchored by a collection of city-states in the lowlands of modern-day Guatemala, Belize, and the Yucatan Peninsula. But around 700, these city-states began an inexorable decline that ended in their total abandonment. While the independent Maya survived until the Spanish conquest in the late 17th century, the postclassical Maya were a less urban and populous civilization.
Archaeologists have posited a number of theories explaining the decline of the classical Maya, from foreign invasion to disease epidemic to a collapse in trade with neighboring cultures, but one of the oldest and most persistent theories centers on drought. The Yucatan Peninsula and Petén Basin were already particularly susceptible to variability in rainfall—the soil is thin and sandy, and a regular seasonal drought complicates agricultural productivity. Though the Maya had solved this problem through advances in fertilization and irrigation, studies of soil and stalagmites in the region indicate a decline in rainfall of between 25 and 40 percent in the late classical period. For a culture living off an already fickle water supply, this megadrought may have been too much for even advanced Mayan hydrological engineering to overcome.
Drought by itself, however, doesn’t explain the fall in its entirety. It doesn’t explain why the Maya didn’t return to the classical cities after the climate righted itself in the second millennium or why the northern cities that ascended in the aftermath never reached the heights of the lowland city-states. Nor is it clear why the drought occurred in the first place. It may have been cyclical, but some researchers believe that the Maya instigated the drought by clear-cutting rain forest, cutting short the water cycle that topped off the reservoirs that slaked their thirst during the dry periods.
Almost as mysterious as the decline of the Maya is the fact that the classic Mayan civilization took root where it did. Dense, urban settlements dependent on agriculture have not historically thrived in jungle climates rooted in limestone soil. That the Maya flourished there at all is testament to the ingenuity of their civilization.
How Were the Pyramids Built?
The pyramids built by the ancient Egyptians are among the most well known and celebrated in the world. Egyptians engineered the model for what most of us consider the classic pyramid design: a square base and four smooth triangular sides.
The awesome design and massive size of the pyramids have evoked some fanciful explanations. Some people have suggested that inhabitants of the legendary Atlantis civilization, the biblical Noah, and even extraterrestrials built them, while others claim levitation was used or that the Egyptians possessed a now-lost, unique technology to help them erect the remarkable structures.
Indeed, there is no known Egyptian hieroglyph or relief or any surviving written account from that time depicting the building of the pyramids. For centuries, Egyptologists, scientists, engineers, writers, and mathematicians have theorized how the pyramids were built. All agree, however, about the basic techniques of pyramid construction.
Copper chisels were used to quarry soft rocks such as sandstone and limestone, while dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock, was used on granite and diorite. The blocks were transported from quarries usually located in Aswan to the construction sites down the Nile River on rafts or barges during the rainy season.
Without knowledge of the wheel, pyramid builders used teams of oxen or manpower to drag the stones—many weighing more than 60 tons (54,431 kg)—on a smoothed, level surface built from the Nile to the construction site. The stones were pulled on sleds or on rolling logs, and the roadways may have been lubricated with oil or water.
The big debate of archaeologists, scientists, and professionals centers upon exactly how the massive stone blocks were lifted to the top of the pyramid as it was constructed upward. Extant ramps—made of mud, brick, earth, or rubble mixed with fragments of brick for added stability and strength—have been found at several pyramid sites over the years. Some Egyptologists theorize that side ramps could have been erected, spiraling around the four sides of the structure, while others suggest a steep staircase-type ramp. Some propose a straight, sloping ramp built from the ground to each side, which was constantly raised as the pyramid rose. One recent theory suggests that two types of ramps were used: an external ramp to build the bottom portion of the pyramid and an internal ramp to complete the structure.
Recently discover
ed tombs of pyramid workers indicate that the structures were built by paid laborers, rather than by slaves as previously believed. Many of the laborers were farmers and local villagers, who considered it a high honor to work for their god-king rulers and build their monuments. The workers were provided food, clothing, and decent housing, and many received tax breaks and other perks for their efforts. Modern Egyptologists estimate as many as 30,000 laborers worked on a single pyramid.
Whatever the exact construction process, it is undeniable that the ancient Egyptians engineered some of humankind’s most massive and awe-inspiring building projects. Archaeologists are certain that they achieved their success without supernatural aid—and certainly without the assistance of alien beings.
Index
3-D printing body parts
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet
A
aboriginal Australians
adrenaline
aging
Aguirre, Anthony
Akira Iritani
Alexander, Stephon
alien life
Allamandola, Louis
allergies, peanut
alternative universes
amygdala
Andel-Schipper, Hendrikje van
Anderson, Adam
anhydrohexitol nucleic acid (HNA)
animals
extinct, cloning
migration of
sensing of magnetic fields by
Antikythera mechanism
antioxidants
appendix (internal organ)
aptitude tests
Arctic terns, migration of
Aristotle
artificial limbs
Asimov, Isaac
asteroids, deflection of
100 Mysteries of Science Explained Page 13