only the very occasional YouTuber will acknowledge that “sometimes people just do weird shit for no reason” is the most likely explanation for the MAJORITY of famous “mysteries” including extremely disturbing or creepy stuff like apparent crime scene photos. that big SOS sign in the woods made of logs? that’s something someone, even a normal person, spends a few days doing for no reason because it’s fun, never thinking of the potential negative downstream effects and then if they hear it became a problem later?? the majority of normal people will NEVER admit to it because they don’t want to get yelled at. it’s impossible to prove that’s what happened but it’s a strong, strong contender
other stuff i think is usually or often just stuff people did for no reason or for reasons so esoteric they are functionally meaningless: most paleolithic art. most runic inscriptions. many henges of various kinds. most large scale modern day art mysteries including the Toynbee tiles. the guy who made a huge throne in a storage locker out of candy wrapper foil. Henry darger’s work but in a complicated way i can’t really explain. DEFINITELY the voynich manuscript like i take one look at that thing and immediately think “a weird guy had a nice time on this project for his own personal amusement” like that is the vibe absolutely.
call this Gauger’s Razor: until the artist admits to or can be proven to have been doing something intentionally, assume they were just fucking around
if you look at a list of discovered inscriptions (on Wikipedia or one of the online rune databases) the majority of runic inscriptions are shit like “comb” scratched into a comb. in fact the most recent inscription discovered appears to be someone doing the equivalent of loopily practicing their own signature on a big rock, complete with just deciding to stack up the B rune in multiple locations on the boulder for no reason (not a bindrune or mirror rune, just someone who thought BBB looked cooler than B). the runic inscriptions that are curses, grave markers, etc, are significantly in the minority
A few years ago, archeologists discovered a previously undocumented standing stone assembly in a field in Scotland. Later, it was discovered that it was actually built in the 90s by a bored farmer, who did such an exceptional job replicating the regional style as to fool trained archeologists, and then never told anyone about it for thirty years.
I mean the pyramids were fundamentally some fucks stacking up blocks in a way they thought looked cool
