Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Bogel 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 or 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 University 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 searchers 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 outhers wrote in the 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 is anti microbial and can rapidly kill bacteria, yeasts, and viruses. Ancient civilizations knew of copper's microub 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 d 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 was written by Christopher Hauseiotas and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other long lasting topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.