OK so there are ancient mysteries we've solved and those are great and I love them. but there's this whole other category of unsolved ancient mystery that hits different because nobody knowing the answer is kind of the whole magic.

There's a new roundup over on MSN that collects 25 of these and it is exactly the kind of list that makes you want to call in sick to work and just stare at your phone for six hours.

You've got the Voynich Manuscript, which is a medieval book written in a language nobody has ever seen before, with illustrations of plants that don't exist. Codebreakers from both World Wars tried to crack it. Professional cryptographers have spent decades on it. AI has been thrown at it. Nothing. Nobody has a single clue what it says or who wrote it or why, and at this point I think we have to accept it might be an elaborate medieval prank.

Then there's Stonehenge, which everyone knows about but somehow still can't fully explain. Like yes, we know it's a calendar or a burial site or a temple or all three. But the question of how people moved 25-ton stones from a quarry in Wales all the way to Salisbury Plain, 150 miles away, without wheels or cranes or anything resembling modern engineering, is still genuinely unanswered. Multiple teams have tried to recreate the transport using period-accurate tools and every single attempt has been, like, close but not quite convincing.

And those are just two! The full list covers 25 of these and they range from "OK that's a fun puzzle" to "I am going to lose sleep over this." There are underground cities in Turkey that could hold 20,000 people and nobody knows who built them first or why. There are giant ground drawings in Peru that you can only see from the sky, made by people who would never have been able to see their own work from that angle. There are metal objects found inside chunks of coal that are supposedly millions of years old and every time I think about that one my brain just makes a small static noise and moves on.

What I love about lists like this is that every single entry reminds us that human beings have always been completely bizarre and incredibly clever, and we have been leaving behind confusing junk for future generations since basically the start of organized society. Somewhere right now there is an archaeologist staring at a 4,000-year-old artifact and thinking "what on earth were you people doing" and I just think that's wonderful.

Every solved mystery is proof that stubbornness pays off. But every unsolved one is proof that the world is still capable of surprising us, and I think we need that more than ever.