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