I not often cynical, but I confess to being uninterested in the "dead ends" of history. Perhaps these are areas though where a historian (or layperson) might find rich for "what if" speculation. For me it's more like if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it…

The Antikythera mechanism is another one that is uninteresting to me because, whatever it is, it seems to have been a one-off.

Maybe, like James Burke's obsession with "connections" in history, I am drawn instead to historic through lines.