Into the Ossuary: Consult the Bones - Part 1

You and your skeleton are cordially invited to join your Stuff to Blow Your Mind hosts on an excursion into the bone-choked depths of the HowStuffWorks ossuary. What curious skulls and skeletal specimens will they uncover? What curious science and cultural anomalies will factor into their discoveries? Grab a torch and join them in the depths in part 1 of 2.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
in this episode we are venturing into the house Stuff
works Awesiuary because like like a great educational institute. Um.

(00:25):
We're of course so situated over an underground catacomb stuff
full of human remnants. We have this wonderful bone chandelier
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,

(00:48):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:52):
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,

(02:12):
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,

(02:34):
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

(02:56):
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

(03:18):
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,

(03:41):
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

(04:03):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:46):
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

(05:07):
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,

(05:29):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:41):
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

(07:02):
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,

(07:26):
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.

(07:49):
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,

(08:10):
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,

(08:32):
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

(08:53):
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

(09:13):
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,

(09:37):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:20):
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,

(10:43):
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

(11:12):
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

(11:33):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:20):
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,

(12:44):
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

(13:05):
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,

(13:28):
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

(13:49):
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

(14:10):
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

(14:32):
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

(14:55):
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,

(15:18):
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.

(15:39):
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

(16:00):
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.

(16:25):
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

(16:46):
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

(17:06):
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

(17:29):
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

(17:50):
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

(18:13):
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

(18:36):
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.

(19:05):
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

(19:25):
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,

(19:45):
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,

(20:08):
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

(20:30):
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

(20:52):
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

(21:15):
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

(21:37):
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

(21:59):
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.

(22:21):
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,

(22:42):
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

(23:05):
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

(23:27):
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,

(23:50):
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

(24:13):
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

(24:33):
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

(24:56):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:38):
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.

(25:59):
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

(26:20):
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,

(26:41):
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

(27:01):
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.

(27:23):
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

(27:46):
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