Bogs, Glaciers, Deserts: Great places to find preserved humans and old pants
Every few years or so, preserved humans that are thousands of years old are discovered in bogs, retreating glaciers, and deserts. It's truly fascinating!
People have pretty much looked the same since we became human. According to Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, if you took a Cro-Magnon and put them in contemporary street clothes, they'd blend right in. Check out the famous Tollund man – found in a Danish bog, he is even wearing a toque! Even the tattoos of a 2,500 year old Siberian princess look contemporary. Tattooing is an ancient practice. Is tattooing exclusive to humans? I'm not aware of any animals that have the tools or cultural practices necessary for tattooing. More recently preserved humans – only a mere 100 years old – soldiers from WWI have been found in retreating glaciers in the Alps.
This brings up the question – what are things that make humans distinct from other animals?
In The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond mentions that speech – especially grammar and syntax is unique to humans. Think about it. Learning a second language is HARD. It's not just grunting. The rules are incredibly complex. Even saying a sentence is complex, never mind saying it with different intonation.
Even the most linguistically complex animals sort of stop at the point where sentence formation happens. It's the different between pointing and saying "Juice" and simply saying "I would like the juice on the table". WOW.
And clothing. Check out this discovery of 3,000 year old pants, which demonstrate the transition between togas and draped clothes to clothing that was suitable for horse riding. Incredible! Here's another article on ancient pants.
4 thoughts on “Bogs, Glaciers, Deserts: Great places to find preserved humans and old pants”
Sounds so cool! It’s incredible how lifelike these preserved mummies and objects are. I remember how this inuit girl who died in the cold centuries ago still looked lifelike, because her body was frozen and never decayed.
Whoa, not going to lie, this kind of scares me, just a little…But quite interesting!
That really is cool! Must be great to study her.
It is very interesting, by recovering corpses from the past that refused to rot, we can determine their cause of death, physical condition, diseases, age, eye color, skin color, etc to find out what kind of people from the past we are dealing with.