wonder 404

One thing the excavators noticed was that after draining the flooded waters, at certain levels it began to flood again. Yet despite it being common knowledge that Oak Island only rises 36 feet above sea level, the contractors managed to push the flooding shaft as evidence of an elaborate pirate booby trap in the now 163 foot hole. They then announced to the press that the conveniently missing artifact was genuine and the flooding pit was confirming evidence of pirate activity and intricate booby traps.

Six people were killed during the various expeditions that lasted from it's discovery until 2005 when the island was sold for $7 million to a private collector. Recently it was bought and reopened for tours, but tourists wont find anything there but it's curious history and the ghosts of it's claimed victims.

What those tourists will find is countless sink holes scattered all over the island identical to the original Money Pit sink hole, and most of them can be tracked back to a number of caves with small entrances dotting the island's shoreline. It's almost impossible for a human to traverse these sink holes toward the caves, even with modern equipment its undertaking has always resulted in numerous fatalities. Furthermore, it should be remembered that McGinnis found this sinkhole after finding a fishing tackle box, it was hanging from a nearby tree so the lights he saw leaving the island most likely belonged to an early morning fisherman. The fisherman was probably casting off the island because the fish are at their hungriest in the darkest hours before the break of day. Unfortunately, six men lost their lives due to this oversight and the viral sensationalism of the case.

The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum in the book's pages has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century, and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. It was passed around as a gift for royalty until it was was rediscovered in an Italian monastery in 1912, and due to it's location historians believe the manuscript was most likely composed in Europe. It is filled with illustrations, diagrams, and a mysterious text written from left to right and cryptographers and it's owners have been trying to decipher it's text for decades, since it was rediscovered.

The first nine words have now been decoded, a British researcher claims he has cracked it. The world-renowned 600 year old manuscript is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures, as well as many pages written in an unknown text. Now Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire, says he has decoded words in it for the first time. "I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," he said. "The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants. I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at medieval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results."

He has identified the words for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars which seem to be the Pleiades, and also the word Kantairon alongside a picture of the plant Centaury, a mediaeval herb, as well as a number of other plants. Altogether, Bax says he has worked out: Juniper, Taurus, Coriander, Centaurea, Chiron, Hellebore, Nigella, Sativa, Kesar, and Cotton. This has stirred up a lot of excitement in code-breaking and linguistics world because it could prove to be a crucial breakthrough in deciphering the complete manuscript. 

Since the 15th century, the manuscript has baffled scholars, cryptographers, and code-breakers alike, who had all failed to read a single letter or word of the text. Over time it has attained an infamous reputation because no one had ever even come close to revealing the Voynich Manuscript's true messages, until now, but not for lack of trying. Many theories had been proposed, and some of them suggested it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci, or secret Cathars, and even the lost tribe of Israel, or most recently the Aztecs. Some have even proclaimed it was produced by aliens. It contains drawings and names of many plants, but very few can be positively identified. It could be because the majority of the plants that are pictured, are no longer commonly used. Although recently it was noticed that they match stylistic manuscripts about botany and other topics from a slightly earlier era. These drawing could have been immediately recognized by sight in the time that it was made. It also may be written in a dead European language that was probably mostly out of circuit even when it was created. This little-used language could have been used to record information, but also used as a form of subterfuge and code.  This would help to protect against unwanted readers and to prevent possible charges of witchcraft. A strange witch-hunting epidemic was spreading through Europe and often targeting academics. Also, the picture shown above from the manuscript is obviously a form of the Zodiac. Looking at a common Zodiac diagram from that era and region could have hastened the process of translation.

We know that the Incas began to disappear after the Spanish Conquest, the mystery is in why they went so quietly and without a fight. Machu Picchu, the great Incan City, was buried deep within the Andes Mountains. It had engineered lands for farming and massive stone formations built with rock used from local quarries. It only lasted for about 85 years before the city was completely abandoned. Another great mystery of the Inca Empire was it's strange economy. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Centered in Peru, it stretched across the Andes' mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today's Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru - all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled even the Romans. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city life, but nevertheless used no money for trade. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all. The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. Many aspects of Incan life remain mysterious in part because our accounts of their life came from the Spanish invaders. They effectively wiped them out and re-wrote their history. If we consider the vast resources the Incas had at their disposal, a public system where everyone works their own land and everyone provides for themselves with equal opportunity to shares in resources, it could have worked for a time. It is similar to the ideal example of communism, but without the stigma and competition from other nations. It might have been quite successful without the interference of another nation, and it was, until the much more advanced Spanish arrived. 

But how would this elaborate system maintain operation: buildings, streets, food, and all life's necessities, without a system of writing to keep them organized? 

It's an enigma known as the Inca paradox, and for nearly 500 years it has stood as one of the great historical puzzles of the Americas. But now a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton may be close to untangling the mystery. His quest revolves around strange and once-colorful bundles of knotted strings called khipu. The Spanish invaders noticed the khipu soon after arriving but never understood their significance – or how they worked. At the beginning of the 17th century, a group of Spaniards traveling in the central Peruvian highlands, east of modern-day Lima, encountered an old Indian carrying a khipu, that he insisted held a record of  "all [the Spanish] had done, both the good and the bad." Angered, the Spanish man burned the Inca man's khipu, as they did to countless others over the years. Some of the knots did survive, and for centuries people have wondered if the old man had been speaking the truth. 

Then, in 1923, an anthropologist named Leland Locke provided an answer: The khipu were files. Each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle likely held census data or it summarized the contents of storehouses. Roughly a third of the existing khipu don't follow the rules Locke identified, but he speculated that these "anomalous" khipu served some ceremonial or other function. The mystery was considered more or less solved. Then, in the early 1990s, Urton, one of the world's leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than the tallies of the llamas they owned. For example, some knots are tied right over left, others left over right. Urton came to think that this information must signal something. Could the knotted strings also be a form of writing? In 2003 Urton wrote a book outlining his theory, and in 2005 he published a paper that showed how the Incas could include place-names as well as numbers in their khipu. 

Urton knew that these findings were a tiny part of cracking the code and that he needed the help of people with different skills. So early last year he and a graduate student, Carrie Brezine, unveiled a computerized khipu database – a vast electronic repository that describes every knot on some 300 khipu in intricate detail. Then Urton and Brezine brought in outside researchers who knew little about anthropology but a lot about mathematics. Led by Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater, they are trying to shake meaning from the knots with a variety of pattern-finding algorithms. One is based on a tool used to analyze long strings of DNA, another one is similar to Google's PageRank algorithm. They've already identified thousands of repeated knot sequences that suggest words or phrases, and now the team is closing in on what might be a writing system so unusual that it remained hidden for centuries in plain sight. If successful, the effort will rank in importance along with the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and it could result in Urton's team rewriting history.