People dig up old junk all the time. Sometimes we know what it was used for; sometimes we don't. Today's mystery thread will focus on the latter. From the antikythera mechanism, to the neolithic venus figurines, to /u/an_ironic_username's brain, there is a whole host of things whose true purpose remains a mystery. Share one from your area of study!
The Oseberg Ship Burial (c. 834AD and earlier) was certainly an odd one. Two women were buried in a ship tied to a huge boulder; one 60-70, the other originally thought to be 25-30, now 50-55. They were buried in expensive clothes and the general opulence of the burial is unmatched in Norway, begging the question that if the older body is a queen, where are all the other queens. It just gets stranger from here. The younger woman's bones show she was from Iran, and the older woman appears to have had metabolic craniopathy. Such a disease gave the sufferer masculine features, a beard and likely an obese frame. The diet of both women also appears to have consisted entirely out of meat, a rareity for the time. No one has proposed an explanation for what the hell was going on that takes in all the evidence. Not su much an object, but certainly odd.
Ingstad, A. S., 'The Interpretation of the Oseberg find', in The Ship as Symbol in Prehistoric and Medieval Scandinavia, ed. O. Crumlin-Pedersen (1995), pp. 139-47
Someone who is more familiar with Paleolithic Europe, do we know what those worked pieces of bone in the Young Prince burial of Arene Candide may mean?
I'm knee-deep in studying musicology, specifically the social aspect of music, and what really gets me is that we know next to nothing about music in early human history (and there's still a debate about performance practices from even just a couple hundred years ago - but that's a whole other topic). Bone and clay flutes have been found in neolithic sites, but we can only guess at how music was a part of that culture. Was it just on the level of whistling while you worked, or was it a part of ritual and religion? I know it's not as much of an unsolved mystery as some things, but for me it really drives home how intangible this sort of thing can be.
It reminds me of the stone that an australopithecus africanus picked up 2.5 to 3 million years ago - we can guess at why it was picked up, but how did this person feel about this stone? Did it inspire something more than just "huh, neat?"