Dodos, Dinos and anything long dead can be recreated by Gary Staab of Staab Studios.
Join us on tomorrow’s ‘Dead-Stream’ Monday May 4th at 12pm pst with paleoartist, Gary Staab. You can watch here.
You can see his creations at museums the world over and also on PBS’ NOVA special ‘Iceman’.
Gary is going to take us on a tour of his studio and tell us how he takes fossils and turns them into tangible creatures. He’s like a time detective slash artist.
Join us live or watch The Dead-Stream for 24 hours after the live feed in my Stories.
Hey Toronto come see me at this event. Let me make you laugh as I tell fart jokes… then we riff a movie together. Why? Because I really need your toonies.. and your brain juices.
Pharaoh Ramses II’s Egyptian passport, issued in 1976 for passage to France nearly three millennia after his death.
In order to leave the country, Egypt required anyone leaving the country, living or dead, to have the proper papers. Seemingly the first mummy to receive one, Ramses had his occupation listed as “King (deceased).” Bibliothèque Infernale on FB
The Inca civilization of Peru, as with many other ancient Andean cultures, mummified many of their dead and buried them with valuable materials such as precious metal jewellery, fine pottery, and sumptuous textiles. Important mummies could also be periodically removed from their tombs to participate in ceremonies where they were also offered food as if they were still living persons. Those mummies (mallki) which escaped looters have, in most cases, been excellently preserved, thanks to the dry climate of the Andes region, and they provide a unique insight into the culture, religious practices, and everyday life of the Incas.
Mummification was only one type of burial employed by the Incas and was an ancient Andean manifestation of ancestor worship which illustrates a deep reverence for older generations (ayllu) and kinship within communities. Considered a link between the living and the gods, these mummies could also be taken from their resting place and ‘consulted’ on important occasions so that their knowledge might serve the living community. Given places of honour and offered food and drink, mummies were involved in such ceremonies as marriages, sowing, and harvesting, or when long journeys had to be undertaken by individuals within the community.
““These practices would…underscore the significance of the burial places and the importance of bringing the dead to these locations in a manner that contained and protected the body, following principles that were culturally regulated,””
*CW: Depictions of skeletal and mummification of human remains.
““What is striking about these results is that the demographic history of a cross-roads region as Xinjiang has been marked not by population replacements, but by the genetic incorporation of diverse incoming cultural groups into the existing population, making Xinjiang a true ‘melting-pot’,” said Prof. Fu.”
Bodies found in a 200 year-old Hungarian crypt have revealed the secrets of how tuberculosis (TB) took hold in 18th century Europe, according to a research team led by the University of Warwick.
A new study published in Nature Communications details how samples taken from naturally mummified bodies found in an 18th century crypt in the Dominican church of Vác in Hungary have yielded 14 tuberculosis genomes, suggesting that mixed infections were common when TB was at peak prevalence in Europe.
The research team included collaborators from the Universities of Warwick and Birmingham, University College London, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest. Read more.
The Routa 5 (The Pan-American Highway) from Atacama Desert to Santiago has so many great stops along the way. Atacama Desert has the world’s oldest mummies, the oldest mummy recovered in Atacama Desert is dated 7020 BC, which is 2,000 years BEFORE the first Egyptian mummy.
Atacama Desert is 105,000kms2, so we drove through it for a long time! It is the driest non-polar desert on Earth and so to be honest there sometimes isn’t much to see except dry open plains as far as the eye can see, so when we saw the “La Mano del Desierto” (The Hand of the Desert) poking out of the sand just a few hundred metres from the highway it was a big surprise!
We also found some geoglyphs - which are images drawn into the landscape, some on a grand scale! The age of the images range from 600 - 1500AD. San Pedro de Atacama is also a great place to visit, it is a hot spot for hippies and tourists looking for adventure. We saw some great views and a salt lake, unfortunately the geysers and hot springs which are famous in the area were closed due to the recent heavy snow.
rrayed in crypts and churches, with leering skulls and parchment skin, the desiccated dead of Sicily have long kept mute vigil.
But now, centuries later, these creepy cadavers have plenty to say.
Five years into the Sicily Mummy Project, six macabre collections are offering scientists a fresh look at life and death on the Mediterranean island from the late 16th century to the mid-20th.
Led by anthropologist Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity in Palermo (map), the ongoing investigation is revealing how religious men and their wealthy supporters ate, interacted, dealt with disease, and disposed of their dead.
“These mummies are a unique treasure in terms of both biology and history,” says Piombino-Mascali, who is also a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.) “They can tell us a lot if they are studied appropriately.” (See pictures of Sicily’s mummies from National Geographic.)
Show and Tell
In the case of the Sicilian mummies, that means x-ray exams and CT scans rather than invasive sampling and autopsy. Radiographic techniques preserve the specimens—the oldest of which dates to 1599, when Capuchin friars began mummifying clergy, then nobles and bourgeoisie who hoped to secure blessed afterlives—even as they peek inside.
And what lies within?
For one thing, evidence of a good diet, says Piombino-Mascali, whose international team includes scientists from Germany, Brazil, and the United States. Since most of the mummies were well off in life, they ate a balanced mix of meat, fish, grains, vegetables, and dairy products.
But that gastronomic affluence came with a price. Radiographs of the bones also show signs of maladies like gout and skeletal disease, which Piombino-Mascali says “tended to afflict the middle and upper classes in preindustrial societies.”
And of course wealth couldn’t protect them from aging. More than two-thirds of these bodies show signs of degenerative disorders, says Piombino-Mascali—"probably because most were old adults when they died.“ (From National Geographic magazine: Sicily’s mummies offer lessons about life.)
Spilling His Guts
As work continues apace in Sicily, which operates as an autonomous region of Italy, discoveries are coming from unlikely places.
Consider the studies performed by Karl Reinhard, a forensic scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He and his graduate students recently conducted a pilot program to see what they could glean just by examining intestines.
Their subject: "Piraino 1,” a male in his 40s who lived at the turn of the 19th century, one of 26 mummies in the Piraino Mother Church’s Sepulcher of the Priests in northeastern Sicily, which dates to the 16th century.
Radiology revealed that he had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. But the real surprise came when Reinhard’s student Melissa Lein found evidence of milkwort, a pollen plant with antitumor agents used in China and Turkey but thought to be uncommon in Sicily.
“That indicates that people here had an esoteric knowledge of medicinal plants,” says Reinhard, whose team also found traces of grape pulp, a purgative with compounds effective in cancer treatment and cardiovascular disease. Based on the type of pulp, adds Reinhard, Piraino 1 likely died in the winter.
What’s more, Reinhard’s student Kelsey Kumm found an enormous whipworm infection—involving more than 600 worms—in the mummy’s intestinal tract. Kumm concluded that because the man had been sick with other diseases, his immune system was vulnerable to whipworm, a fecal-borne parasitic disease usually associated with poverty.
“From all these intestinal findings we can put together a pretty interesting picture,” says Reinhard. “Though this individual was well-to-do in life, one can speculate that his activities brought him into contact with the lower classes. This shows how we can create a thumbnail sketch—his disease, his diet, his time of death—from the inside of a mummy.”
Mor(t)al Quandaries
Mummification in Sicily usually meant stowing a body in a ventilated chamber, draining it of bodily fluids, and stuffing it with straw or bay leaves, to preserve its shape and combat the stink of death. Months later it would be washed with vinegar, dressed in its Sunday best, and laid in a coffin or hung on a wall.
The more recently mummified—like two-year-old Rosalia “Sleeping Beauty” Lombardo, who died of pneumonia in 1920 and lies with 1,251 others in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo—were embalmed with chemicals, and thus better preserved.
But for how much longer?
Piombino-Mascali is eager to perform DNA investigations on the mummies—including those at newly studied collections in the towns of Caccamo and Gangi, where wax was “peculiarly” used to create partial and complete death masks—to understand how they might be related. But with moisture, humidity, and dust preying on some of the collections, particularly those at Palermo and Piraino, time may be running out.
Piombino-Mascali says climate-control systems such as air conditioning are desperately needed, though it’s unclear if the money or political will exist to put them in place.
“We need to act fast to save these mummies,” he says. “It was the wish of these people to be mummified. So we have a moral [imperative] to preserve them.”
Whatever comes next, Piombino-Mascali says his team’s work has had an unexpectedly existential effect on the local populace.
“For many years the subject of death was taboo [in Sicily],” he says. “In the 20th century, things like the two world wars somehow influenced the approach Sicilians had toward death. They just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
"Now, given the scientific importance of what’s emerging with these mummies, people are understanding that in Sicily, death has always been part of life. And for centuries many Sicilians were using mummification to make sure there was a constant relationship between life and death.”
In 1845, more than 100 men set sail to the New World in the hope of coming across the Northwest Passage, a legendary trade route to Asia (apparently, Lewis and Clark’s failure had only emboldened them). Lead by Sir John Franklin, They set off from Greenhithe, England in two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, on 19 May 1845. The two ships carrying the men and their supplies never reached their destination—they were never heard from again. At least not until 1850, when a separate expedition came across what remained of a long-dead community on Beechey Island, including three mysterious graves, and in them the bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine.More than 100 years later, in 1984, a team of anthropologists traveled to the region to conduct forensic tests on the bodies found in the graves on Beechey Island. After exhumation, it was discovered that all three bodies were spectacularly well-preserved, thanks in no small part to the permafrost in the tundra. So well-preserved, in fact, that the team was able to determine the probable cause of death for the men, who had died some 138 years before.As well as signs of pneumonia and tuberculosis, they learned that each of them had a lethal amount of lead in his system, probably from the ship’s water distillation system, which would have produced high lead content. The amount of lead found in their system was staggering—each man would have needed to consume 3.3 mg a day over the course of eight months to account for it.
Known as the Detmold child, this 8-to-10-month-old baby died in Peru around 4480 BC – more than 3000 years before the birth of Tutankhamun. According to a recent scan (PDF) using X-ray computed tomography, the child was born with a malformed heart.
“The heart defect has caused a flooding of the lungs and has most probably led, in combination with the pulmonary infection, to the death of the young child,” according to Wilfried Rosendahl, curator of the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany, home to many of the mummies in the exhibition. The baby also suffered from pneumonia and turricephaly, a disease that elongates the skull.
The CT scan also revealed a small, flat, rectangular object nestled beneath the fabric around the child’s neck, assumed to be a kind of pendant, “perhaps an amulet made of bone,“ says Rosendahl.
(Image: J. Ihle/Lippisches Landesmuseum, Detmold, Germany)
