Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Bogel Bomb. Here. Imagine opening a dusty box shelved
Speaker 1: away in a research facility. Inside you see some small bones,
Speaker 1: a few antique artifacts, and a tiny mummified hand colored
Speaker 1: an eerie shade of green. Would you shriek in terror?
Speaker 1: Would you worry it was a harbinger of some terrible curse?
Speaker 1: Would you at least see if the mummified hand could
Speaker 1: grant you a wish or to remove the literary shock value?
Speaker 1: And that's precisely the dilemma that presented itself in two
Speaker 1: thousand five, when two biological anthropologists at Hungary's University of
Speaker 1: Zaged investigated a box filled with small bones and the
Speaker 1: mummified hand of a human baby found in central Hungary.
Speaker 1: Though discovered in a medieval cemetery, the remains of the baby,
Speaker 1: either premature, miscarried, or stillborn, according to the researchers, date
Speaker 1: back to only the second half of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: But how was the baby's hand mummified and why wasn't
Speaker 1: the rest of its body equally preserved. To answer this mystery,
Speaker 1: the searchers looked to the artifacts found alongside these human remains,
Speaker 1: A small ceramic pot and corroded copper coin were part
Speaker 1: of the burial package. The researchers found that the copper
Speaker 1: coin exactly fit in the baby's hand, and surmised the
Speaker 1: copper from the coin leached into and preserved the organic material.
Speaker 1: Their findings were published in a paper in the journal
Speaker 1: Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. The paper details that the mummified
Speaker 1: hand contained copper levels four hundred and ninety seven times
Speaker 1: higher than would be expected, and that another baby found
Speaker 1: at the site, buried without a coin, did not show
Speaker 1: similar mummification. The outhers wrote in the paper, according to
Speaker 1: ethnographic references, newborns who died without being baptized were rolled
Speaker 1: up in some sort of textile and buried in a pot,
Speaker 1: for example, a milk jug or small wooden box, and
Speaker 1: abandoned cemeteries usually located close to the ruins of medieval churches.
Speaker 1: They also point out that low value coins were occasionally
Speaker 1: placed next to or in the hands of a corpse
Speaker 1: as an offering to the afterlife. In its metallic form
Speaker 1: is anti microbial and can rapidly kill bacteria, yeasts, and viruses.
Speaker 1: Ancient civilizations knew of copper's microub fighting powers. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the oldest books ever discovered is an ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian medical text known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Dating
Speaker 1: back to between d and b C. It describes using
Speaker 1: copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water, and the
Speaker 1: practice continues to this day. Researchers proposed in two thousand
Speaker 1: nine using special copper drinking vessels to sterilize water in
Speaker 1: areas where other antibacterial medicines and applications are less common.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Christopher Hauseiotas and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: long lasting topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com.