The Earth is giving up its secrets.
Mummies,
people immortalized by ancient science or nature's whim.
Their preserved remains give us clues across millennia,
silent witnesses that speak through their clothes, skin, fingernails.
Mummies are telling us truths about the past,
giving up information long forgotten.
What they say is helping science shape the future.
Mummies
On the northern coast of Peru is a pyramid made of
millions of mud bricks.
It has survived for 2,000 years because it is extremely dry here.
It only rains about once every five years.
Here at El Brujo,
archaeologists have unearthed one of the biggest finds of mummies
in South America.
They provide clues to a forgotten civilization from the Chicama Valley.
Near the summit, they are recovering skeletons from shallow graves.
Some are found with copper foil in their mouths
and copper discs on their noses.
Nobody knows exactly why.
Further down on the lower slopes of the pyramid,
they have found bodies wrapped in cloth, which are better preserved.
There are at least 300 of them.
These are mummies, bodies that have hardly decomposed.
Each one is an archaeological bonanza no matter how incomplete.
Anthropologist John Verano picks over them inch by inch
for the information they contain.
For me, what's exciting,
as a physical anthropologist is that normally I workjust with skeletons.
And skeletons can tell you a lot about health, disease,
physical characteristics.
But if you can add to that soft tissues like hair and skin
and in some cases, even internal organs,
you can identify things that the skeleton simply doesn't record.
Hair, for instance, can tell you how people lived.
The material the mummies were wrapped in can shed light on
how they were preserved.
The Chicama people had no written language, but they left a history
in the form of their own bodies.
This woman died 1500 years ago.
If she hadn't been mummified by the extreme dryness,
her body would have disappeared a long time ago.
There wouldn't be a trace of her, not an atom.
Normally, nature reclaims every bit of a dead body,
some bits faster than others.
When an animal dies,
nature has an ingenious way of disposing of the body.
The corpse is attacked from within.
Bacteria that naturally live in the gut start to devour their host.
And the host helps them do it.
When a cell dies, sacs within it release corrosive chemicals
that break down its cell walls, making it easy for the bacteria
to get in and feed.
Once in, they multiply and eat their way through the entire body.
The whole process takes about a week.
After death, a human body is reduced to a skeleton
in a matter of months, even when buried in a coffiin.
But there are places on Earth where local conditions prevent
this from happening.
In the subzero temperatures of the Arctic, bacteria freeze
and are fixed in a state of suspended animation.
The effects on the human body can be dramatic.
In 1984, a team of scientists flew up to the North Pole
and landed near a makeshift graveyard.
The graveyard contained the bodies of explorers
who had been trying to find a shipping route through Northern Canada,
the elusive Northwest Passage.
The scientists wanted to determine how and why they had died.
They were stunned by what they found.
Although the bodies had been buried 150 years earlier,
they were perfectly preserved.
Such naturally formed mummies could last indefinitely.
But beneath the surface, they are not as perfect as they look.
As a body freezes, jagged ice crystals are formed in the spaces
surrounding the cells.
These damage the delicate cell walls.
If the mummies had been allowed to defrost, these damaged cells
would have turned to mush.
So the scientists examined the bodies as quickly as possible to minimize
the risk of their thawing out.
They found evidence of TB and evidence of lead poisoning
from the tin cans that carried the explorers' food.
They then returned the mummies to their icy graves.
In a bid for immortality,
hundreds of people have deliberately chosen to have themselves
frozen after death.
It is a process known as cryogenics.
Despite the damage that freezing does to their life-giving cells,
such people are hoping that the day will come when scientists
will resurrect them,
repair their cells, and enable them to live forever.
But even when death cannot be cheated a corpse may survive to tell its tale.
In Iron Age Britain, a man was murdered and dumped in a marsh.
Ironically, the people who wished to
dispose of his body could not have chosen a worse place.
These spongy wetlands are called peat bogs.
Peat is formed from a plant rich in tannins,
chemicals used to tan leather.
Any flesh that comes into contact with tannins is preserved.
Tannin molecules penetrate the skin.
They pass into the loose mesh of collagen fibers of
which it is composed,
filling the spaces and tightly bonding the fibers together.
If bacteria couldn'n digest the living skin,
they certainly can'n digest it now.
Thus pickled, the body of the murdered man lay intact
and undisturbed for 2,000 years.
Then, in 1984, it was discovered
and cut from the peat by a team of scientists.
Once the peat was removed, they started looking for clues.
The social standing of the dead man was revealed
when his beard was closely examined by archaeologist Don Brothwell.
We noted that the beard and the mustache was well trimmed,
so we investigated the ends of the hair to try and find out exactly
how the hair was cut.
Not just cut, but cut by two blades coming together simultaneously.
Cut, in fact, by scissors.
So here we are dealing with the first discovery of evidence of
scissors in the Iron Age Britain.
But also, of course, it indicates that this individual
was someone of special social status,
because only a few individuals would have had access to this
kind of equipment.
Why should an aristocrat have been dumped in a bog?
He been hit on the head.
An X-ray revealed that part of the skull had been driven
into his brain.
Scientists thought he might have been mugged for his money.
Then they discovered he was wearing something that looked like a necklace.
This turned out to be a garrote, made of animal gut.
With the help of a mirror held under his chin,
they could see a deep laceration.
His throat had been cut.
He had a number of severe injuries, which on their own
could have caused death,
and yet they were assembled together, which certainly argues against it
being a simple mugging.
So the best answer, I think, is to suggest that the individual
was ritually killed
and that a number of individuals took part in some sort of special killing.
To date, 1800 well preserved mummies
have been recovered from the peat bogs of Northern Europe.
In another part of the world,
quite different natural elements have combined
to form some of the oldest known mummies.
Occasionally, the sands of the Egyptian Desert shift to
reveal ancient history.
Ancient bodies with their ancient possessions.
When this body was buried 5,000 years ago,
the hot sand acted as a sponge and drew the fluids from it.
Once starved of water, the bacteria died
and the body was preserved.
Although fingernails, hair, and skin are still intact,
the internal organs have probably perished.
Sights like this must have made a deep impression on the early Egyptians.
As their society developed, their burial customs
became more elaborate.
No longer satisfied with graves in the sand,
they started to build brick tombs.
Here, beneath the Earth, in wooden coffiins,
their loved ones could be protected from the scorching sun and sand.
But ironically,
the very act of separating the bodies from the sand that was preserving them
had disastrous results.
The bodies rotted in their graves.
We know from their writings that the Egyptians believed in an afterlife
But in order to qualify, a body had to be as good as new.
This 3,000-year-old mummy of King Ramses II...
shows how the Egyptians perfected the art of mummification.
But these master embalmers never recorded their methods.
It was the traveling Greek historian Herodotus
who, in 450 BC, gave us the first written account of the process.
He is said to have witnessed the strange religious
ritual at firsthand.
They take first a crooked piece of iron,
and with it draw out the brain through the nostrils.
Next, they make a cut along the flank with a sharp Ethiopian stone
and take out the whole contents of the abdomen.
And then the body is covered for 70 days in a local salt called natron.
The body is wrapped around from head to foot in bandages of
fine linen cloth,
smeared over with gum, which is used generally by the Egyptians
in the place of glue.
It is then closed in a wooden case which has been made especially
for the purpose
and shaped into the figure of a man.
Herodotus explained in general terms how the process was done,
but was short on detail.
Six years ago, a team of scientists, which included
a mortician, Ron Wade,
set out to see if they could fill in the gaps.
They decided to try and make a mummy by following
the sketchy instructions of the Greek historian.
They were offered the cadaver of a 76-year-old man,
who donated his body to science.
Mortician Ron Wade is familiar with modern surgical instruments,
but now he was going to attempt surgery with replicas of ancient tools
found in Egyptian tombs.
The question was, which tools were used for what?
Some of the tools were rather obvious,
and there were other instruments, rather odd-looking things
with hooks and...
chisel ends on it that we really didn'n know.
And even going back into the literature,
we didn'n have any inventory or anything that specified what tool
was necessarily used for what part of the process.
One puzzle was how the ancient embalmers could remove a brain
without disfiguring the face.
They describe taking the brain out through the nose.
So to do that, you would have to somewhere penetrate up
through the nasal cavity.
By taking the barb end of this instrument,
we knew that if you came in here, like this,
and turned it somewhat, you could fracture that center piece out
and actually create a bigger opening, almost like a dime-sized hole.
They now had the opening.
But how did the Egyptians remove something as large as a brain
through such a tiny hole?
One tool, a length of wire, was thin enough to introduce
into the brain cavity.
By entering the wire up through there and pulling on it,
we thought, well, maybe that where they got their pieces of brain out.
Well, in fact, because the organ so soft, it really wasn'n doing that.
It was just tearing through.
So at that point, then, we were looking for what might have been
the way that the Egyptians used.
They returned to the writings of Herodotus and realized they might
have missed something vital.
He makes a passing reference to palm wine.
It is made from crushed dates and is a very potent liquor.
Could this wine have helped dissolve the brain tissue?
Maybe the Egyptians had poured it into the brain cavity,
as well as using the wire tool.
But at this stage, it should be relatively clean.
You'll see blood, you'll see...
And we tried to macerate or actually destroy,
liquefy the brain tissue as we went.
And after we did this, it was a half an hour on each side,
the wire came out
and we found that when we actually turned the body over,
that the fluid and the brain tissue came out as a liquid.
The next big mystery was how the Egyptians managed to halt
the process of decomposition.
Herodotus said that once the internal organs were removed,
the body was covered in natron.
Natron is a naturally occurring compound of salt
and bicarbonate of soda,
used by the Egyptians for thousands of years to preserve fish.
The salt acts like a sponge, drawing fluids from the fish's body,
while the bicarbonate of soda reacts with the moisture
to create an alkaline environment that kills bacteria.
Together, they make a perfect preservative.
The scientists imported 600 pounds of natron
from its natural source, the salt lakes of northern Egypt.
They left the body in a room with the same temperature
and humidity as found in Egypt.
I was rather apprehensive that this, in fact, was going to work
and that, in fact, the body would not be decomposing
under this mound of natron.
But several weeks later, they were surprised to find that
their body was indeed intact.
The top of the body, the mummy, if you will, was hard,
because it had desiccated. The water had, in fact, come out.
The tissue was very, very dark, meaning there was no water in that.
That's it.
Hundreds of yards of linen bandages were used to wrap the mummy,
forming a tight seal to keep out insects.
As identified by Herodotus, molten tree resin
containing germ-killing chemicals
was used as a glue to keep the bandages in place.
But would their mummy stand the test of time?
Unable to wait three millennia, Wade sneaked a look
afterjust six years.
Wade was most worried about the heart the only internal organ the Egyptians
ever left inside,
and the part of the body most susceptible to decay.
It might have retained moisture and bacteria may have gone to work.
So we'll go into the chest cavity.
With the help of a surgeon,
Wade used an endoscope to take a look at the surface of the heart.
Of natron there, the one we left in, by the heart. Right, right.
And there's the heart.
They didn'n like what they found.
It looks like something growing on the heart. Yeah.
Whether it's bacteria or fungus or what, I'm not sure. Okay.
They decided to take a biopsy of the mysterious growth.
Right on top of one of those and...
Camera out a little bit... right there.
Here we go, biopsy.
See how, now, see, that's hard.
That's, yeah, it's like calcified. Yeah.
The brittleness of the growth suggested that it was dry
and free from bacteria.
The biopsy confirmed that the surface of the heart was not decomposing.
To check the inside of the heart, they used an X-ray machine
called a CT scanner.
They found no sign of decay.
It's still early, but all the signs are good.
Wade's experiment has gone a long way towards explaining the detail of
how the Egyptians mummified their dead.
The work in understanding the practices of other cultures
is only just beginning.
Although the mummies from El Brujo in northern Peru are not
as old as their Egyptian counterparts,
they are far more mysterious.
The Chicama people are an enigma to archaeologists,
because they left no written records.
With the Egyptians, the great breakthrough came
when the hieroglyphs were deciphered,
revealing their attitudes to life and death and explaining
their rationale for making mummies.
With the Chicama people, it's more diffiicult.
In the absence of hieroglyphs, other less explicit things
have to be deciphered.
Their cloth, for example.
It's cotton, and it appears to have been a very important part
of their culture.
Most of the Chicama mummies are wrapped in it.
It adorns their heads, is woven into their clothes,
and is used in its unspun form to make their blankets.
Pictures of cotton plants even have pride of place
in their tapestries
But this cotton might be more than just a cultural icon.
It might be an actual preservative.
It is an unusual strain and is still grown in the area.
It is naturally colored, unlike the white cotton grown elsewhere.
The pigment that gives the cotton its color contains tannins,
the same antibacterial agent that preserves mummies in peat bogs.
This is why it is sold as an antiseptic.
The favored local treatment for cuts is to rub cotton on them.
The cotton which left its mark on this mummy's face
may have helped to preserve it,
not just by absorbing moisture, but also by toughening its skin
against bacterial attack.
The cotton clothing found on the mummies is being studied by
Amy Rodman, an expert in ancient textiles.
She believes that the Chicama people knew what they were doing
when they wrapped their dead in cotton.
It seems that cotton always was understood
as having curative properties.
Many of the bundles, almost all of the bundles,
have a kind of pad of unspun cotton,
prepared cotton over the face, directly over the eyes.
I think definitely they understood that cotton
could preserve the body itself.
And the fact that the bodies are buried so close to the surface
hints at their reasons for doing it.
It may be so the dead can be consulted at times of need.
The way some of the mummies are positioned inside their cotton
cocoons appears to support this theory.
The body sits upright, as if alert and ready to speak out.
To the Chicama people, the dead were still, in a way, alive.
Here, there is no question
that there was a very active ancestor worship...
...ancestors having power and links to the land
and you wanted to preserve your ancestors as, in a real sense,
as a testament to the fact that the land was yours
and you had always been here for long periods of time.
Some bodies are better preserved than others,
but they can all say something about their civilization.
Using the same techniques that a modern coroner might use,
Verano is trying to work out whether these long forgotten people
were hunters, farmers, or fishermen.
Hair helps here.
In fact, a little hair can go a long way.
In this case, 3,000 miles north, to Charlottesville, Virginia
and the laboratory of Steve Macko, hair analyst to the world.
Samples arrive here from everywhere, and he can find a story
in almost any strand.
Well, there's a lot of hair in the world
and we only need a little bit of it,
and you don'n have to destroy a very valuable artifact
in order to do our analysis.
It's a recorder.
Basically, as it's growing, it's telling you what your diet
is a week later.
And so the fact that this hair is so readily available
and people give it to us,
as long as it's preserved, then we're in good shape.
After a meal, nutrients flood into the bloodstream and are soaked up
by the root of each hair.
These chemical traces of the meal are locked into the hair
and are pushed up as the hair grows.
Each month, the hair grows half an inch, keeping a running record of
what is being eaten.
But for how long?
Will the samples from Peru really tell Macko what these ancient people
ate for dinner?
He drops a few strands of a mummy's hair into a furnace.
They are instantly vaporized, enabling the machine
to identify individual atoms.
The mass spectrometer counts all the atoms
and differentiates among them,
finding chemical signatures unique to each kind of food.
So, what did the Chicama people eat?
It comes as a surprise.
Nine samples from this population of
coastal Peru show a very large component of corn in their diet,
which is kind of interesting, that here's a population
living on the coast,
but a very significant, perhaps 90 plus percent of their diet
is somehow derived from corn or corn-related plants.
They were living right on the coast
and we saw no indication of the marine diet in their foods.
Here, at the edge of a productive ocean...
...the Chicama people were mainly farmers.
The people who live on this coast today are mainly fishermen.
2,000 years and two completely different lifestyles.
It was similar detective work that solved another mummy mystery
on the other side of the world.
Dominic Montserrat is an Egyptologist who is intrigued
by a mysterious artifact
that has lain in the vaults at the National Museums of Scotland for
well over a hundred years.
This 2,000-year-old Egyptian coffiin has never been on public display.
This is the first time it's been seen on film.
It's from a very late period in ancient Egyptian history
and it's the only double coffiin ever found.
There are two children in it.
Just looking at it, I can tell that it's probably from the 2nd Century AD,
mostly from the color, which is very characteristic of the period,
and the decoration.
The painting is poor, with a lot of red and green.
It's typical of its period.
Over here, on the body of the coffiin, are representations of stylized nets,
which will enable the two children to be reborn in the most perfect
and vital form in the next world.
And they're about to step into a boat,
with which they will travel with the god Osiris to the next world
to be reborn.
But it's not the outside of the coffiin that's in any way remarkable.
It's what's inside.
The mummies of two children,
one wrapped and one that somebody has unwrapped.
Compared to the clumsy decoration of the coffiin,
the children were mummified with great expertise.
Real care has been taken on this embalming.
Gilding on the thorax,
this is because the Egyptian gods are believed to have gold flesh,
and when you die, you become like a god,
so they gild the flesh to create that appearance.
But you're even got things like the eyelashes preserved.
And look at the child's fingernails and toenails. They're superbly done.
The high quality of the embalming is very rare
for a period when the art of mummification was in decline.
This provides a clue to the social class of the children.
Their parents must have been rich to be able to afford such workmanship.
Their bodies conceal a further piece of evidence that
may help identify them.
Beneath the mummies is a pair of portraits of Nut, the sky goddess,
one for each child.
These are very like the portraits of Nut
that are also found on the coffiins of one of the most eminent families of
Thebes, ancient Egypt's capital city.
This is the family of Cornelius Sotia a very rich man
who was the governor of Thebes during the reign of Hadrian,
around the 2nd Century, among the middle of the 2nd Century AD,
which is just the right date.
I'm thinking that it's possible that the children are actually
from Cornelius Sotia's family.
Buried with the children were two magic spells to protect them
in the afterlife.
When hieroglyph expert Bill Manley translated the texts,
he found more detail than he expected.
There are two very interesting things which emerged straight away
from the texts.
First of all were their names.
One was called Pediamon, the other was called Penhuropabiq.
Both of these names are male, so we know their genders.
Two boys, apparently from the same family, buried together.
But what was their exact relationship?
The other thing which emerged was the name of their respective mothers.
Pediamon's mother was called Tarananutat.
Penhuropabiq's mother was called Amanopa,
so they're got different mothers.
This evidence seemed to challenge the theory that the boys
were from the same family.
But they could still have different mothers and be from the same family.
Modern technology offered a way to find out
without surgery or any more unwrapping.
Instead, Penhuropabiq was put in a CT scanner,
a machine that can see into the body at any level.
This allowed orthodontist James Moss to look at the teeth of the two boys
and compare them for genetic similarities.
He could also tell from the stage of development of the teeth
how old the boys were when they died.
The younger one, on this side, is probably
around the age of one year.
This boy is probably in the region of three years old.
Now, if we turn the two images round so that we can see them
not in full face but in profile,
we can actually see the position of the teeth, one to another.
The older boy's top jaw juts well beyond his lower one.
And the younger one has exactly the same configuration.
It's an hereditary trait which they share.
I would have suggested that there is a very strong genetic connection
between the two children.
So were they buried together because they were half-brothers
by different mothers but with the same father?
By reading between the hieroglyphs,
Bill Manley has pieced together a theory.
This family, we're dealing with a situation where the wife had died.
The father had to remarried, another child had been born,
and yet within the space of a few months
after the death of the first wife,
both of the children, the first wife's child
and the second wife's child, had been taken away at the same time.
Scientists can only guess at why they died.
Whatever killed them, these two boys were among
the last mummies ever made.
In 200 AD, something new was sweeping through Egypt.
It was a different religion, with new ideas about immortality.
Christianity made a strong distinction between the body and the soul.
The body, it said, was just the soul's temporary housing,
and should be allowed to decay naturally,
while the soul went on to the afterlife alone.
In their tombs, the mummies
became relics of another culture, largely forgotten,
except by grave robbers and curiosity-seekers.
Until the 19th Century, when Europeans suddenly
became fascinated by them.
There was an outbreak of amateur Egyptology and a wide
interest in all things Egyptian.
Old stories about mummies and their magical healing powers were revived,
and many of the bodies were ground up and sold as medicine.
There was such a glut of mummies that they began to lose all value.
Their bandages were ripped off and used to make brown paper.
And it was even rumored that some railways were burning mummies
as fuel in their locomotives.
Eventually, the craze for mummies died down.
Then, at the beginning of the 20th Century,
there was a sudden demand for the embalming arts
from an unexpected quarter.
The Soviet Union needed to preserve a man
in order to preserve an ideology.
He was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
the Soviet leader and one of Communism's founding fathers.
He was so popular that colleagues worried about what might happen
if he died.
Would the regime go down with him?
And then, in January, 1924, he did die.
The funeral was massive.
Party leaders were eager for as many people as possible to see Lenin,
to keep his image in their minds along with his revolutionary spirit.
They put statues of him everywhere.
But statues weren't enough.
What was needed was Lenin himself.
What was needed was a mummy.
Scientists were assembled.
The body that had naturally been preserved by the Russian winter
was starting to defrost.
Its face had begun to sag and rot.
Clutching at straws, the scientists turned to a chemical method that
had previously only been used to embalm anatomical specimens.
And it seemed to work.
For three-quarters of a century,
Lenin's mummy has been celebrated as a triumph of Communist science.
Now, rumors are spreading.
Reports of fungi growing on the mummy suggest that
it is starting to decompose.
There are calls for Lenin to be buried at last, along with his ideology.
Perhaps our only hope for immortality lies in cyberspace.
We are traveling, from head to foot, through a body
that will never decompose.
Every organ, bone, and blood vessel has been perfectly
preserved in the memory of a computer.
Scientists can use this digital mummy for research.
The stresses an activity puts on a group of muscles
can be measures more effectively on the virtual body
than on a real one.
Medical students can train on the digital mummy
without hurting anyone.
Its flesh can be dissected and healed over and over,
until a surgical technique is perfected.
The man who invented this is Victor Spitzer, an anatomist,
and his first problem was finding a body to transfer to cyberspace.
The challenge in finding a body is that most people that die
have some visible signs that they're dead
and that the people that donate their bodies are generally old.
We were looking for a young body
that didn'n have visible signs of death.
That's diffiicult.
To find young, fit bodies that are about to die,
this is the place to look.
Spitzer's search ended with Joseph Paul Jernigan,
a 39-year-old murderer.
Jernigan had killed a man during a bungled robbery
and been sentenced to death.
After spending 12 years
on Death Row at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville,
he exhausted all possible appeals.
And in his cell, with only a few hours to go,
he decided that even if his life had been wasted,
he could still do some good with his death.
So he donated his body to science.
Next to his cell is the death chamber, where he was executed
by lethal injection.
His body was immediately taken to Denver, Colorado...
and Spitzer's laboratory, where it was frozen in gelatin
and cut into blocks.
Spitzer's plan was to record the entire human body in every detail.
To do this, he had to cut the corpse into cross-sections
only a millimeter thick.
A special saw had to be designed.
Each slice was photographed by a digital camera,
and then the entire body was reassembled, like a deck of cards,
in the computer.
A year after his execution, Jernigan's body was whole again,
resurrected in cyberspace.
Anatomist Bob Rice uses Jernigan's mummy to help develop
space suits for NASA.
Okay, now, the muscles that are actually attaching to the bones,
are we going to be able to identify the force that's being exerted? Yeah.
The way the body responds to different designs
can now be measured in the virtual world before a single suit is made.
The digital space man can then be subjected to the extreme environments
a real astronaut would have to face.
Using virtual reality, Bob Rice can now monitor the effects of
zero gravity on bones and muscles
without risk to life and limb.
Mister Jernigan will help us go back to the moon,
go on to Mars, and go on into the solar system as NASA envisions,
because we now have a immortal mummy,
if you will, a cyber-digital mummy that is a representative of mankind
as we journey in the stars.
The first cyber-digital mummy may take us into the future,
but he has much in common with his centuries-old counterparts.
As mankind continues to find and unearth these ancient messengers,
there is no end to what answers they'll give.
The Earth has many secrets yet to tell.