I have a soft spot for solved mysteries, which is a strange confession for someone who makes his living on the unsolved ones. But there's a specific pleasure in watching a question that haunted people for a hundred years get answered by a machine that didn't exist when the question was first asked. MSN assembled a roundup of twenty of them, and I read the entire thing at an hour I'm not going to specify.

It got me thinking about the tools that keep closing cases like these, because there's a pattern. Genetic genealogy, the same technique that keeps cracking cold cases, has put names on remains that sat anonymous for decades. Isotope analysis reads a skeleton's chemistry like a travel diary, telling you where a person grew up and what they ate. CT scanners and 3D imaging pull detail out of old remains without ever laying a blade on them. And ancient DNA has quietly dismantled entire origin stories, redrawing maps everybody thought were settled.

What a list like this hammers home, case after case, is that the creepy part was never supernatural. It was biology, chemistry, or weather doing something we didn't yet have the vocabulary for. That's the lesson of every solved mystery I've covered, from Anastasia Romanov to Ötzi the Iceman. The explanation arrives and it's mundane and it's worse somehow than the ghost would have been.

The reverse happens too, at least sometimes. My suspicion is that modern analysis occasionally confirms that people in the past were telling the truth about something nobody believed, and every time that happens I think about how many "legends" are just observations with no surviving witness left to vouch for them.

What I keep circling back to is the asymmetry of it all. Twenty mysteries closed probably means twenty more opened in the process, because every new instrument creates its own anomalies. We solved the skull and then the isotopes raised a question about the migration pattern. We identified the body and now the murder is the mystery. Science doesn't close doors, it moves the hallway.

Go read the list. Pay attention to which answers leave you satisfied and which leave you with that small cold feeling that maybe the question was better company than the truth. I know which ones got me.