Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and this is a
Speaker 1: classic episode from the podcasts archives. Over the millennia, humans
Speaker 1: have used all kinds of methods to preserve the bodies
Speaker 1: of the dead after their lives have ended, and for
Speaker 1: all kinds of spiritual and emotional reasons. But today's episode
Speaker 1: is about one case of accidental preservation after death through copper.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb. Here, imagine opening a
Speaker 1: dusty box shelved away in a research facility. Inside you
Speaker 1: see some small bones, a few antique artifacts, and a
Speaker 1: tiny mummified hand colored an eerie shade of green. Would
Speaker 1: you shriek in terror? Would you worry it was a
Speaker 1: harbinger of some terrible curse. Would you at least see
Speaker 1: if the mummified hand could grant you a wish er
Speaker 1: to remove the literary shock value? And that's precisely the
Speaker 1: dilemma that presented itself in two thousand five, when two
Speaker 1: biological anthropologists at Hungary's You Adversity of Zaged investigated a
Speaker 1: box filled with small bones and the mummified hand of
Speaker 1: a human baby found in central Hungary. Though discovered in
Speaker 1: a medieval cemetery, The remains of the baby, either premature, miscarried,
Speaker 1: or stillborn, according to the researchers, date back to only
Speaker 1: the second half of the nineteenth century. But how was
Speaker 1: the baby's hand mummified and why wasn't the rest of
Speaker 1: its body equally preserved. To answer this mystery, the researchers
Speaker 1: looked to the artifacts found alongside these human remains. A
Speaker 1: small ceramic pot and corroded copper coin were part of
Speaker 1: the burial package. The researchers found that the copper coin
Speaker 1: exactly fit in the baby's hand, and surmised the copper
Speaker 1: 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 authers wrote in the page paper, according
Speaker 1: to ethnographic references, newborns who died without being baptized were
Speaker 1: rolled up in some sort of textile and buried in
Speaker 1: a pot for example, a milk jug or small wooden box,
Speaker 1: and abandoned cemeteries, usually located close to the ruins of
Speaker 1: medieval churches. They also point out that low value coins
Speaker 1: were occasionally placed next to or in the hands of
Speaker 1: a corpse as an offering to the afterlife. In its
Speaker 1: metallic form, copper is antimicrobial and can rapidly kill bacteria, yeasts,
Speaker 1: and viruses. Ancient civilizations knew of copper's microup fighting powers.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the oldest books ever discovered is
Speaker 1: an ancient Egyptian medical text known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus,
Speaker 1: dating back to between twenty hundred and b c. It
Speaker 1: describes using copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water,
Speaker 1: and the practice continues to this day. Researchers proposed in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine using special copper drinking vessels to sterilize
Speaker 1: water in areas where other antibacterial medicines and applications are
Speaker 1: less common. Today's episode is based on the article Anthropologists
Speaker 1: discover mummified green baby hand on how stuff Works dot com,
Speaker 1: written by Christopher Hassiotis. Brain Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: Our Heart Radio in partnership with How Stuff Works. Dot
Speaker 1: com and it's produced by Tyler clang A. Four more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio visit the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.