To Infinity And...In Theory: How To Politely Ask A Mummies Age

And you thought the term “Dead-Stop” when in a traffic jam was just an expression. I’m sure this 2,000 year old commuter at one time or another would probably have agreed with you. However, as highway workers and Archaeologists are discovering in South Florida this past week, she may feel a bit differently now.

Okay, so it’s highly unlikely she was a commuter, but highway surveyors still received quite a shock when they unearthed what they estimate to be the 2,000 year old remains of a Native American. It isn’t the first time this has happened either; in fact, in Florida they actually have a state law that requires highway workers to survey a dig site thoroughly before excavation just for this reason.

The two millennia is just a rough estimate going on what they know about previous discoveries in the area. The body was recovered with no artifacts, so without Carbon dating it will be impossible to determine an exact time of death. Why can’t they carbon date you ask? (My word, I doth declare she is a lady good sir!) No I don’t mean Match.com style, I mean take a sample of DNA and run it through a series of tests to pinpoint how old she is. There’s a slight problem…

In order to use Carbon-14 dating (a process we’ll discuss in this article today) it requires the destruction of the material being analyzed. To the Native American culture, which the body will respectfully be returned to, this is unacceptable because it goes against their belief structure. Given our past history with the Native Americans upon coming to this country, I’d say we should definitely give them this one.

Today at To Infinity And…In Theory we’re going to discuss a little bit about culture by breaking down some of the other discoveries in that area. We’ll also talk about Carbon dating as I mentioned above and some other very important mummies where the process was used. But first let’s talk about the processes that take place and the very distinct difference between this Native American discovered under a highway in Florida and a Pharaoh sealed away in a sarcophagus in ancient Egypt. And no, it’s not their tax bracket.

Not All Mummies Are Created Equal

While there is much debate on the origins of man there is one thing I can be darn certain of. Ever since the first human being died and someone close to that human being experienced grief, some sort of ceremony in honor of the deceased has been performed. The Vikings would send their warriors off to sea. Cremation is another known form that has been around since ancient times. The Balinese will bury their dead for a period of time before cremating them so as to do it on a particular day sacred to their beliefs.

In other words, death, grief, and ceremony are universal. But results may vary.

Take the spectacular procedures that went into Egyptian burials for example. The mummification process, while deeply rooted in the hierarchy of their religion and Gods, was quite an advanced procedure. It showed an incredible degree of medical expertise as the procedure can be easily spoiled by a variety of factors. It also showed a profound understanding of how certain chemicals interacted with the body so as to preserve it for long periods of time. And I do mean long periods of time.

The oldest Egyptian mummies discovered to date were excavated from shallow graves near the modern city of Naga el-Gherira and go as far back as 3000 B.C. Some of the oldest mummies ever discovered in the world were excavated from South America, dating as far back as 5,050 B.C.! While the mummy named Ginger (pictured above) that was found in Egypt was naturally preserved, the Chinchorro Culture were actually using an artificial process very similar to the one the Egyptians used, and unlike the Egyptians who immortalized only the elite, mummification was open to all Chinchorro.

(Chinchorro mummy with a clay mask.)

(King Tutankhamum buried in lavish sarcophagus and golden mask)

As you can tell from the two pictures above, while the means to make the mummy were very similar, such as in the preparation of the organs, the ends were very different. Since the Chinchorro would use this procedure on the poor as well as the rich, their dead had a more humble appearance, whereas the lavish casket’s made from solid gold and the deluxe monumental tombs built in their honor took the Egyptians to the opposite end of the spectrum. (Yes I said tombs, not “pyramids.” A common misconception for another time.)

Either way in both cultures there was a process in which the internal organs were removed and the body was dried over a period of time. (Accounts range from 30-40 days for the Chinchorro and 40-70 for the Egyptians.) The Egyptians would place the organs in canisters called Canopic jars. The heart would be placed back in the body after it received a wine and spice wash, then after being salted and dried, it would be wrapped in bandages and ceremoniously placed in their final resting place.

If you’d like to read the entire process of mummification you can check out this link to mylearning.org and their article on how it’s done.

So by now you’re probably saying, “well that’s all fine and dandy…but how do they know for sure how old these guys really are?” It’s quite a unique method indeed and the discovery of it was quite ingenious. But before we talk about modern mummy dating methods, let’s go back a few hundred years and see how they used to do it before the dawn of fancy computers.

The Father of Mummy

While Jean-Francois Champollion may not be the man who discovered the very first mummy, his research on hieroglyphics certainly paved the way for the study of them. Because of this he is considered by many to be the father of Egyptology. While Napoleon was digging around Egypt, in 1799 his men inadvertently discovered one of the most interesting things (ever discovered in my honest opinion) to date. They called it, the Rosetta Stone.

Yea. That’s a rock. And yes, those are words. This tablet is rather peculiar, not because it’s a marvel to think that in ancient times something this elaborate was possible to make, but because the tablet is written in three different languages. The top part is ancient Egyptian, the second is Demotic, and the third is…you guessed it!

Greek!

So why was it written in three languages? Well it turns out it doesn’t matter what language you read it in, the story on the tablet is the same. Since they already had a strong understanding of the Greek language this became the focal point for learning how to decipher the ancient Egyptian language.

This is where Jean Francois Champollion comes in. A linguistic prodigy who was fluent in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, French, English, and even the more obscure ones like Latin, Greek, and Coptic (the current language of the Egyptians at the time), by 19 the man was considered by many a genius. In 1821, with the help of English physicist Thomas Young, Champollion broke the code, and finally scientists were able to shed some light on this exciting and brilliant culture, that had so long eluded them.

I know most of you are probably thinking, “Um, shouldn’t the Egyptians have been able to decipher them? They’re their ancestors aren’t they?” You’d think so, but the style the original hieroglyphs were written in had disappeared from Egyptian culture sometime around 400 A.D. and been replaced with a new form of language, one that had been bastardized by their Grecian conquerors, Demotic.

This 1,700 pound diary recounting the many good deeds of an ancient Pharaoh became the focal point of study for Egyptology and, even though Champollion had essentially broken the shroud of mystery surrounding this antediluvian epic rock of history, it would still be quite some time before Egyptologists the world around would be speaking hieroglyphic with the confidence they do today.

Want to read a full translation directly from the British Museum of the Rosetta Stone? You can by following the link here.

Excuse Me Waiter…This Tastes Like Mummy

Would you believe me if I told you at one time crushed up mummies were thought to have medicinal properties? It doesn’t take a brilliant scientist to know (using todays reasoning anyway) that a crushed up corpse baked into a pie is anything but recommended as a daily nutritional intake. Nonetheless, people all over Europe carried little pouches of Mummia with them wherever they went.

Because of this a lot of mummies were destroyed as the powder they were turned into was a high price fetching luxury item. Furthermore the bandages the bodies were wrapped it could be turned into paint. There were even cases where the bandages were taken and used as parchment paper.

Luckily this kind of desecration didn’t go on for an exceptionally long time. Unfortunately enough of it went on that perhaps the oldest mummy that could have ever existed has already been destroyed. Mummies have, since their discovery, given us inordinate amounts of insight into the lost cultures of the world. It’s a shame to think that so much may forever remain unknown because of this.

19^th Century Rules for Dating My Teenage Mummy

So obviously radiocarbon dating hasn’t been around forever. So how did the scientists of yore figure out just how old their new discovery really was? Are you ready for this?

They’d guess.

Sure it was an educated guess going off of texts from the period and history of the area, but it was still a guess. And what about the mummies that were discovered in the desert in shallow graves? Where’s justice for Ginger! It wouldn’t be until the 1950s when a scientist by the name of Willard Libby out of the University of Chicago would find the answer to figuring out just how many birthdays King Tut and the Chinchorro mummies had missed.

The answer was lying right before their eyes all along. It was in Carbon. But it wasn’t just any old Carbon, it was Carbon-14. See regular Carbon is made up of six neutrons and six protons, thereby earning it the name Carbon-12. When cosmic rays strike Nitrogen atoms in our atmosphere, a strange process begins to take place. It converts the Nitrogen atoms into Carbon-14. These molecules, instead of having even pairs of six and six, have six protons and eight neutrons. This does more than just make it heavier.

The nucleus of Carbon-14 is very unstable, but aside from that it looks just like every other Carbon molecule out there. This instability however, means the Carbon-14 atom is radioactive, and if there is one thing scientists learned about radioactive molecules during that period it’s that they decay. (And go BOOM!) As a molecule decays it loses its radioactivity slowly and the speed at which it unravels is called its “half-life”.

The half-life of Carbon-14 is close to 6,000 years. In order for the atom to decay completely it will take about 50,000 years to accomplish. To you and I that seems like a really long time, but to the planet, that’s relatively less than infancy.

The decay of an atom can be tracked and that’s where the half-life comes in. See Carbon-14 has a set radioactive level that can be measured by scientists when all other contamination factors have been eliminated. After 5,730 years and a series of complicated mathematical equations half of that radioactivity will disappear. In another 5,730 years that radioactivity will decay another 50% and so on and so forth until it has been reduced to a Nitrogen-14 atom and then dies out entirely.

This may surprise you but there isn’t a part of your body that isn’t made with Carbon. Carbon-12 to be exact. But since Carbon-14 is abundant in our atmosphere (and heavier than regular Carbon) it will be ingested by us and work its way into our chemical makeup. Is it harmful? Nah, but if you ever find yourself frozen in the side of a mountain for 10,000 years, when scientists dig you out they’ll be able to tell how long you were there, how old you were when it happened, and what flavor granola bar you had for lunch.

If you want to know more about Carbon-14 dating and even some of the other isotopes they use for this process (like Uranium-235 which can be dated back to 704 million years) head on over to one of my favorite sites HowStuffWorks.com and read their article on Carbon dating. Now that we know how scientists do it, let’s see this process in action. First to Europe, then we’ll find out how they figured out this Florida’s mummy age the old fashioned way.

Here Lies Peat, A Mossly Good Fellow...

While digging up a bog in 1950 Denmark, the man made a peculiar discovery. There was a body! And not just any body, this one looked fresh. After he ran and got the local inspector it was confirmed, there was a murderer running amok in the streets of Denmark. It was a National crisis! A calamity! Oh what to do!

But they were baffled by this body and were having a difficult time identifying it. So they called in Archaeology professor Peter V. Glob. He determined three things. The first, and most importantly, this was not a recent murder victim so there was no reason to panic. Two, this individual had been the victim of a sacrifice of some kind. And number three, all this had happened around 2,000 years ago.

What the police had on their hands was known as a bog body. It’s not meant to be offensive to the deceased. It’s just what they are, (a rose by any other name). This really shouldn’t have surprised them as in 1938 another victim very similar to the Tollund man (pictured above) was found in the very same bog named the Elling Woman, however she was not nearly as preserved.

So what is it that makes these bodies stay together over the vast periods of time from their burial to their exhumation? It’s quite simple really. The answer lies in where they’re recovered from. Bog bodies are found in bogs (duh) and bogs are high in concentration of Peat. Peat is high in concentration of Sphagnum moss, so much indeed that it’s almost entirely comprised of it. This decayed material is what causes the magic to happen.

If the conditions are just right the Peat acts like a preservative, a pickling agent of sorts. While the high pH levels will disintegrate the potassium of the bones it will preserve the flesh and the rest of the body in near mint condition. The acidity usually causes the hair to turn red, but that’s not a big deal. Modern techniques can actually determine what the original hair color of the bog body was (if you’re into that sort of thing).

While these archaeological information gold mines were being discovered all across Europe it seemed as though North America was lacking in this natural phenomena. Then in the 1980’s in Florida it happened. While a farmer was digging out a Peat bog he found a cluster of skulls in his bucket. Soon enough the Windover Archaeological National Historic Site was born. Over a hundred skeletal remains were recovered buried some 5 to 8,000 years ago.

While the conditions may not have been met here to preserve the skin because the composition of the Peat in Florida causes it to be much wetter, it did allow for the preservation of brains in over 100 skulls. It also was the source of the oldest textiles ever recovered in Florida. Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.

These bodies were dated using radiocarbon methods and also did not belong to the Tequesta tribe that the woman recently discovered under the highway belonged to. However the surrounding area where the Tequesta woman was exhumed from is rich in Tequesta artifacts even though none were recovered with her body. So how’d they figure it out?

They guessed, sure it’s an educated guess…

But they’re pretty sure she was Tequesta given her relative positioning to the Miami Circle, which is another ancient historic site in Florida. No pictures taken will be released of the body recovered out of respect for the culture of the deceased. I think this is entirely acceptable as there is already a wealth of information available. I hope you enjoyed this article everyone!

- Ryan Sanders

Thanks for reading and as always feel free to share this around on Facebook and Twitter! If you want to know more about Egyptology, Bog Bodies, or any of the information in the article above you can by following the links in the paragraph above and below. Happy learning everyone!