20 Historical Mysteries We’ll Probably Never Solve

People of a certain age used to say that if it wasn’t on Facebook, it didn’t happen. Do people still say that about, like, TikTok? Whatever — the point is that it was kind of true. If you don’t leave behind some kind of documentation, no one will ever know something happened except the people who were there. That’s pretty beautiful, but it’s not terribly helpful for historians.

Of course, this problem was even worse in the past, when people didn’t have a ready-made platform for sharing their experiences with every other person on earth and cameras in all of their pockets. Some of them didn’t have cameras at all. Can you imagine? So when user Apart-Scale asked r/AskReddit, “​​What historical mystery is unlikely to ever be solved?” the answer was, “Gosh, so many.”