Into the Ossuary: Consult the Bones - Part 1

hanging over us. Uh. It's a delightful place and we hope that you will join us for this episode as we explore some of the specimens we have around here. Indeed, and in case your company doesn't have an osuary, UM, this is also known as the bone house, the facility for the storage of human of course UM now owesuaries. You'll find these throughout human history, sometimes not with such an elegant title. Again, going back to just a bone house or even a bone pit um you look back

to ancient Persia. For instance, the Tzarastrians used a version of of an ossiuary. They would they would take corpses, put them on top of their their towers of silence and birds and the elements to break the bodies down to the bones, and then the bones would be stored away in for safekeeping. And uh. And actually we see some truly ancient bone pits out there that provide us with some of the earliest evidence, even DNA evidence of

early humans and pre human hominids. For instance, back in two thousand thirteen, a German team from the Max Plank Institute was able to identify twenty eight different remains from Spain's Semididas twices, or the bone pit, which contained four hundred thousand year old Homo Heidelbergenis hominids. So we've we've been dumping our skeletons into various tombs and caves and nublettes for quite a while. Uh, it's a grand tradition and uh and one that one that I hope continues,

and it's pragmatic. Um. And we're going to actually look at one of probably the most stellar examples of an ossuary, which is the Catacombs of Paris. You've been lucky enough to witness this place firsthand. Yes, I have been to the Empire of Death and it's it truly is one of the creepiest places I have ever been. At sixty underground and Uh, you know, you go through these small little halls until you get to this marker that talks about, hey, you're about to enter the Empire of Death, and lo

and behold you see all of these bones. Um, this pathway of bones stacked in such a configuration, in such an elaborate one that it's just it's like the Vatican of bones. It's too much. It's almost it's overwhelming. And you imagine the person responsible for arranging those bones, and wonder if if he went absolutely mad with the task. Now are you there on an official tour or is this like a secret underground Parisian ray? If you written, yeah, I can't really tell you the details of how I

got there, just that I got there. Now, of course they aren't just they're willing million for people to ply off the sewer covers and jump down and have a party in the catacombs have a very long history that actually started with Romans. Yeah. I mean, of course, you can go back even even further, Ina, we can go back like forty five million years to where you had

just a tropical sea instead of Paris, France. And eventually, uh, the seabed sediment turns into limestone and This is key, of course, because most naturally occurring caves formed from limestone via dissolution. Uh and limestone is soft yet firm, so it's a great stone to use in construction as well, which is what the Romans were doing, right. Yeah, they were like, look at all this delicious limestone. Let's carve

it out and make things out of it. Yeah. They eventually created the Roman city of Lutatia, the city that would eventually become Paris. And in the process they made they dug up these quarry pits. They resulted in roughly

a hundred eighty seven miles of underground tunnels. And these these cores ended up providing the stone for even such such modern post Roman constructions as uh as Notre Dame well And and they remain that way for quite a bit until the eighteenth century, when they were long abandoned and someone scratched their heads said, hmmm, this could really solve our public health problem, namely, like all these bodies

that we have piling up from various diseases. That's right, I mean, you had you had such large central cemeteries as uh as Saints Innocence are what's the French on that, Well, this is not Holly Fry certified. But I'm going to take a step. Okay, okay, so active Germans. I'm useless on this one. But yes. St. Sentisen is one of the main cemetery, is the largest cemetery in Paris. And you had a situation where you had the bodies were just improperly buried or weren't weren't buried yet. It was

there's things are just stacking up. We've been burying people in the cemetery for for quite a while. And so what are you gonna do. Well, you dig those bodies up, you take the bones, and you deposit them somewhere. Yeah. It took two years to do that, by the way, and then between seventeen eighty seven and eighteen fourteen, bones from other cemeteries were also transferred in the final transfer of bones took place in eighteen fifty nine. Now, there is a ton of history in those bones. I mean,

you have the bones of Robespierre from the French Revolution. Um. I mean, it's just it's a it's a piling up of historical events and historical diseases. Yeah, all just cataloged there in the catacombs. Uh. Into the tune of what like seven million dead Parisians down there, Yes, seven million deporations and perhaps some people of other nationalities stirring about there. But that is why when you go into this it is so it's just like staggering to see that amount

of bones configured in that way. Again, we were talking about a hundred and eighties seven miles of these tunnels and various other little areas. Um, there's there's a place where I think they called it like the footbath for the quarrymen. That's just this big open pool that's sort of fascinating to to be, you know, in this configuration and then just happened upon this pool. So um, it really is sort of this empire of death underground, which

is fitting. Yeah, I mean it really gets down to some of the you know, the fascinations we just have with the skeleton, like what are we to make of the skeleton? This this this part of ourselves that remains after all the flesh has has gone away, and and sometimes when there's for quite some time that that is it's us, but it's also just a part of us. Uh, you know, what are we to make of the skeleton? Well, and keep in mind too that until humans really started

missing about with skeletons. I mean, the natural thing to happen would be deterioration for it just to become part of a leaf litter, which in large part it still does, right, Um, if you have sort of your traditional burial um. But yeah, I mean it was for me. It's the sort of grappling with what life and death is in this attempt to take these bones, arrange them, give meaning, preserve them,

hope that there's an Afro life for them. Yeah, yeah, because I you know, a lot of that is what Western funeral practices come down to, is this idea that there's going to be an actual physical resurrection of the dead. And then we got into that a bit in uh one in a couple of our episodes, the Problem of Immortality and then also the Problem of Hell, both of which deal with what do we do with our ideas about what happens to some permanent, supposedly permanent part of

ourselves when when we pass on. Yeah, And we were actually just talking about this before we started recording this episode, about that song dem Bones, which sort of like we think of a children's song like to THEE. I don't know, Um, that's actually an African spiritual that is talking about if I've got this right resurrection, that all these different parts are fitting back together so that this person can you know,

have a resurrection. It's pretty fascinating when you when you compare that to say that the practice of sky burial into bad and also in parts of Mongolia and elsewhere where, the the idea is to just break everything down and and just have it be reabsorbed by nature to the point where actually, uh, someone is pulverizing the bones. Now there is an idea in terms of green burials that

ossuaries could make a comeback. In other world this practice of moving bones could continue, um because as they decompose, you could then add it to an ossuary and then could sort of clear up that land and reuse it for another burial. Yeah, I really like the idea. The more I read about green burial, the more I'm on board with it. Um. So, I guess ultimately anyone's death is you know, it's it's been a large part in the hands of what you know, the people that come

after you. But I think there's something more, There's something get far more beautiful about your body being broken down becoming part of nature instead of being sealed away in this artificial box, popped with all these artificial chemicals. Uh, you know, for what, for what purpose? Well? And again I think it's as trying to grapple all the questions of life and death and put some sort of form to it and organize it and make ourselves feel better

about it. Um. But the ossuary route is really a lot more practical or any sort of green burial um. You know, because again we've got the population exclusion currently and comeing online in the next fifty years. We don't have any more territory to explore to to really sort of grow our food or bury our dead. So yeah, I mean our cemeteries are nice, but let's maybe we should stop making new ones. You know. That's this land

that commute further the purposes. So yeah, for my part, I say, let the flesh fall off my body, Let the lambur guyers have my bones, let them drop them from from from from from on high onto some stones and then eat the marrow. Wow. So if you did have some sort of traditional barrel that would be on your tombstone, Uh, yeah, I guess I don't know where

the teambstone is gonna go. There. I guess like you know, my descendants living room or something, or you just you find some stone, you need to face it somewhere and say, hey, I existed, my body rotted and then some birds messed with my bones. Tombstone. There you go. All right, look at the virtual Robert Lamb that exists online. All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, we're gonna handle some skulls. Does that mean that we're going down to the basement. Yes, yes, let's look at

some skulls. You know, you you look at the human skull and a lot of things go through your head. We've a very discussed some of this. You know, it appears to be smiling at you or laughing at you with its uh, with its big grins, it's gaping sockets. But you know, the more we look at it, the more we look at the skull, and the more we look at the human hand and incidentally, um, the hands

and feet contain over half the body's bones. Because these are you know, these are delicate instruments, uh that are that have that have evolved for you know, the fine manipulation of of of items and tools. The more we look at them though we can tell that the hand, particularly the fist, was made for punching the skull, and the skull evolved to receive the fifth. The skull and

the fifth are are made for each other. They are there there, their lovers across time and uh and and when you look at the science of it, it's it's really fascinating. There. I don't know that I would say their lovers across time, but I would say they have

certainly connected across time, that's right. University of Utah biologists David Carrier and Michael H. Morgan, a University of Utah physician, contend that these human faces of ours, especially those of our austral epith ancestors, evolved to minimize injury from punches to the face during fights between males, and their paper

is titled Protective Buttressing of the homin In Face. Yeah, they said, if we look back four or five million years at these ancestors, we find an increased robustness in the particular facial bones that are most likely to suffer fracture during a pummeling. Uh And these are these are the areas where we also find the greatest different between

male and female facial structures. Both in austero epiths, both in asterol epiths, and in humans because again, uh, the structures may have evolved in response to that male on mail of violence. Now, initially the idea was something like the these really strong jaws were needed to you know, break down not serving really hard foods. But more and more of this evidence in these resulting studies suggests that no, it's not just to break down nuts. And there is

a difference in gender. Yes. Now, previously back at this study about the skulls, come but Carrier back in two thousand twelve had looked at the bones of the hand, and this is the study where he revealed that proportions of the human hand allow us to make a fist that protects all of those delicate bones and muscles and

ligaments during a jaw shattering, right hook. Because again, it's kind of crazy when you think about it, Like these hands, right, these these these fine manipulative limbs that we use to h to make tools, to make fire, to prepare food, to put food in our mouth, that we're gonna then take those fine instruments and punch people in the face with it. I mean, it's like like a violinist it's gonna take his or her strata varius and then swing

it at an enemy during a battle. It doesn't make sense, right, Well, Uh, the argument here from Carry's research is that we evolve to deal with that. No other primates um or any animal for that matter, can actually throw a punch. You don't see punch is thrown with chimps, with gorillas, none of them. It's a human thing um and Carry argues that our earliest answers just may have benefited from an

evolutionary advantage if they could actually punch hard without injuring. Uh, those five fingers, and they're gonna win mates, They're going to win resources, they're gonna win tribal honor. Furthermore, Carrier also found that a punch is always going to be better than a slap or a chop. Now I've about the chop that can be really effective. Well, a chop,

chop can be effective. And I've i when I shared this study a few years back, when it first came out on on social media and on our blogs, I did have some conversations with people that were arguing against that, people who had a little more expertise in martial arts, saying, well, actually a chop you know, can be extremely effective, or or a palm thrust, etcetera. But Carriers research found that a peak that peak strike force is always the same

no matter what manner of handblow you're using. But the fist delivers all of this force to a smaller area. So according to him, the force per area is up to three times greater with a punch of the face versus a slap to the face. Now, Carrier says, quote, if indeed the evolution of our hand proportions were associated with selection for fighting behavior, you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect from

injury when punched. In other words, coevolution. Yeah, I mean an arms race, essentially almost literally in arms race. Right, you canna swing that big meat club at me? Okay, fine, I'm gonna my jaw is gonna get much bigger to absorb that so it doesn't break its easily. Now, all this being said, uh, Michael H. Morgan, one of the studies co author, says, quote, our research is about peace. We seek to explore, understand, and confront human kinds, violent

and aggressive tendencies. Peace begins with ourselves and is ultimately achieve through disciplined self analysis and an understanding of where we've come from as a species. Through our research, we look at ourselves in the mirror and begin the difficult work of changing ourselves for the better. I think Michael Jackson said the same thing. Yeah, I think so. I mean, really when it comes to changing ourselves for the better.

We'll get into an example this later on. But humans have always been into finding ways to hack their bodies and indeed hack their skeletons in ways that match up with their own expectations of the human form. Well, you know this, this whole study to makes me think of just the complexity of of evolution. Like imagine if it were a boardroom or a committee trying to determine what

shape that the fifth or the skull would take. Because on one hand that you would have individuals saying, all right, look, it needs to be a delicate a delicate system of fingers so that we can do some fine manipulation of crafting projects of uh, you know, of the various interactions with the natural environment. But also it needs to be able to punch somebody in the face. And likewise, the face department are saying, well, this is essentially a communications array.

We have our sense organs frontloaded at the at the top. We want, you know, all the faces to kind of look look the same, so that there's a so that needs a small difference can have an emotional response on the viewer. But also it needs to be able to

take a punch just head on without too much damage occurring. Yeah, and especially when it comes to the hands, I really feel like that potential for peace or thoughtful um ways in which to enter a situation and war are contained within because you do have the intricate system that that thumb, the placement of that that is gives us that sort of advantage with tools and that grasp that no other species has. At the same time, it also gives it

the strength that just wallet the big old punch. But I feel like that like the tool using things should win out here, that that thoughtfulness of like, Okay, how do we proceed. We can use tools, we can use our minds and use communication getting into the universality of of of sign language. We can just use these hands to actually communicate. But or you know, or we can shop people in the face and punch them. Yeah, choice is yours, all right? We're gonna take a quick break

and when we come back more bones. All right, we're back. Let's let's discuss another ossuary of sorts, one that is tied in with with with a central figure in the history of of the United States of America, Ben Franklin, of course, and he's come up before. We've talked about his air bath in which he would just you know, hang out naked during the middle of the night and read when he couldn't sleep. Well, he is associated with this ossuary. Uh did he know about it? We're not

quite sure. But let's sort of unravel this for you. We're talking about number thirty six Craven Street in London, which was Craven Street which was once home to Benjamin Franklin, who resided there between seventeen fifty seven and seventeen seventy five when he was the ambassador for the American Colonies. Now, that's all very fine and well, but in ninet the house received extensive renovations and during that excavations and renovations

were halted because in the basement a thigh bone was found. Yes, the police were called. Uh, they began to dig out more from this pit. In the basement, and they found some twelve hundred pieces of bones, and initial examinations revealed that the bones were the remains of ten bodies, six of them children, and uh, they were about two hundred years old. Um, which all of a sudden casts a new light on ben Franklin. Yeah, and it's uh, it

was probably a pretty interesting if maybe even a little scary. Uh. There for for a few minutes with the friends of Benjamin Franklin House, who were who were orchestrating this whole attempt to get this house in shape. Because as far as places Benjamin Franklin had lived like this one stood up. This one was was a good one to renovate and and and and turn into the museum devoted to the man. And here you go digging around underneath it, and you find this windowless room with a pit full of bones.

And what do you make of it? Now? Now, granted, we're talking about London here, and so in London is is an old city, and if you dig down deep enough in a place like London, you're gonna find just about anything. You're gonna find bones, um, mental flaws. And their article about it asked the question, well, was Franklin a serial killer. Yeah it was no. No, but that still leaves room for aout the questions like was he a necromancer? Was he was he a ghoul? Was he

a bone fetishist? I don't know. The more likely explanation and will never know, is that he had a friend who who definitely owned a saw and uh and a drill probably even, and he happened to be an anatomous and um. Sure enough, when people looked at further analysis of those bones, they saw saw marks, scalpel scraping, and drill holes. And so the story that begins to emerge is that these bodies were taken apart in a in

a very thought full manner, and probably by an anatomist. Yes, the animis in question William Houston, who had previously been a student of anatomist William Hunter, but the two had a falling out, Howiston broke aways, but he continued his studies. Now, this was an interesting time to be an anatomist, because to study human anatomy you need examples of human antomy. Anatomy to study I mean even today, despite all of our our resources, our illustrations are models, um that the

use of computers to really explore the human body. You need cadavers, you need medical specimens to to cut into, to look out, to study, and at the time these uh, we're not easily obtainable, at least in in an ethical sense. You can always get human bodies, but you've gotta be

willing to put in the work or pay for that work. Yeah, well, cadaverish for medical students um, which the demand for dovetailed with the increase in medical students, by the way, created a black market for dead bodies, and these bodies were obtained by people called the resurrection men. And this is

just a really unsavory piece of history. And the reason why people had to go to the black market is because the Anatomy Act of eighteen thirty two wasn't in place yet, and the Anatomy Act um kind of loosened up the laws a bit in terms of getting cadaver

so people had to go to grave robbers essentially. And this really marked the whole medical profession because people began to get, of course, a little bit paranoid and not you know, like if you introduce yourself as a doctor to cocktail party back then you might say, woe, I know, I have an uncle who's terminal and and right on

the edge. Um, please don't go hunting after him. Yeah, I mean the idea here was that if you die and you're buried, there was a chance that a doctor ananimous would dig you up and essentially desecrate your body. And if you were extremely religious and literal about everything you could, you could say, well, they're gonna undo everything that my my burial set out to accomplish, which loops back to Houston, because here's this guy who's just trying

to further his education. He's got his friend Franklin, who may or may not be in town, and Franklin has you know, this great little set up in this house. And by the way, Houston's mother in law is the landlord of this so oh in the location of of this Craven Street house has uh at one end the gallows and on the other end the cemetery. So all you have to do is take a right or left up the house to go ahead and get that body and get it there quickly, which would have been really

helpful for Houston to practice his anatomy on. Yeah. Now, of course you get into the question how much did Benjamin Franklin Now on one hand, is possible that he didn't know anything. It's possible, you know that the fact of friends of Benjamin Franklin house reportedly have some some evidence that that Franklin let you he's gonna have just the whole house while he was living up the street with a landlady during that time. So so that's one

possibility is that he had no idea. He's essentially, you know, home alone, and so I brought in brought in the gadabbers for study, or he was like, the smell is so terrible, I'm moving going up the street. Or you know, maybe to some extendion, was he was aware of it. I mean, Franklin, you know it seems to have been a freethinker in many ways. Um, so maybe he was like, all right, you know, do what you gotta do. As long as you know, I'm not going to have anything

to do with it. But uh, you know, just look the other way and let you continue what you're doing. Yeah, I'll be upstairs taking an air bath. Yeah. Or maybe he was in all the way. Maybe maybe he said, hey, you want some corpses, let's go get it. Let's let's go get him. I can't sleep. I just woke up. I was just just gonna read Naked in the setting Room. But if you're up for you know, hitting the cemetery, then let's let's go do it. I'm up for a party.

And alternate story of Ben Franklin, why not? I mean that we have alternate fictional account of Lincoln, right is the vampire Slayer? Yeah, we can have something that ridiculous with virtually nothing historical to back it up. I mean, here's here's a piece of history, a little nugget from history. This is begging for exploitation. And we've already we have properties that have exploited the Gray robbing at the time. You know, Burke and Hair and all that. I think

there've been several movies about about those resurrectionists. But here you have an American icon. Uh. Then Franklin and he is living on top of a pile of bones, and their their Pilford bodies being brought into his house. You know, you don't you don't even have to add much to that, just on its phone. That would be a great little, uh little comedy, but it's half written already. Yeah, throwing some goes, throwing some necromancy, a google, what have you

and you're you're good to go. Now. If you're interested in some historical fiction about this, there is a great book called The Dress Lodger, but share Erri Holman, and it's about a prostitute and a disgrace doctor and she's called that. It's called the Dress Lodger because at that time, uh, prostitutes would sometimes rent really upscale looking dresses so they didn't look like sort of these third prostitutes that might be diseased, and they get more business, which is in

and of itself really interesting. Yeah, I mean dress for success, right, indeed. Embodied cognition. Yeah, yeah, all right, we've been down here in the ossuary for quite a while. We probably need to break and pick this up in a second episode. Yeah, I'm getting a little, i don't know, claustrophobic. Yeah, I would say lonely, but there are a lot of bones down here. After a while, they kind of kind of

feel like those skulls are watching you talking. Hey. In the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of our podcast episodes, are blog post our videos, as well as links out to our social media accounts. And if you have a thought, please do share it with us. You can send us an email at blow the Mind at house to Work dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.