Can Copper Create Mummies?

After anthropologists discovered a child's mummified hand, they discovered that a copper coin might be responsible for the preservation. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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?

(00:24):
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,

(00:46):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:28):
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.

(01:50):
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

(02:11):
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.

(02:38):
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.