this episode is brought to you by curiositystream a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles for just 2.99 a month get a free 30-day trial by clicking on the link in the description below more on them in just a bit we're all familiar with mummies whenever we say the word we typically think of the ones from ancient egypt wrapped in linen and placed in sarcophagi we find them fascinating because they represent a distinctive aspect of an ancient civilization but the egyptians didn't have a monopoly on mummies no in fact in recent decades scientists have been growing increasingly enthusiastic over a different kind of mummy the bog bodies what are they well like their name implies they are human bodies that have been found in peat bogs these environments have a unique set of characteristics which is pretty amazing at preserving organic material for hundreds or even thousands of years cadavers that have simply been thrown in the bog had been naturally mummified and remained in excellent condition for ages until they were finally dug out again on more than one occasion one of these bog bodies was initially treated as a recent death perhaps even a murder victim because it looked like it only died a short while ago the most famous bog body of all is arguably the total man and for good reason he has been called the perfect corpse by various scholars because his head is so remarkably well preserved even by the standards of bog bodies people from the silkenborg museum in denmark where the tollen man is on permanent display have reported visitors being awestruck others breaking down in tears and rarely even fainting when looking into the face of this man who appears to have died peacefully just a few years ago but in reality he's been dead for well over 2000 years the tollen man is a completely unique glimpse into our ancient past and today we're going to bring you his story it was a monday morning on may the 8th 1950 in the town of silkeborg in denmark and the police received a distressing message about a potential murder victim that may have been killed and then dumped in a nearby pete bogg at some town i can't possibly pronounce about 10 kilometers away this message came from two brothers who were professional pete cutters named viggo and emil hodgard alongside vigo's wife greece and her stepson john they had spent the weekend deep in the bog on saturday may 6th greet was the first to notice something strange buried in the peat they dug it out a bit only enough to realize that it was the body of a human it had been mummified in the peed and exceptionally well preserved so it was not surprising that the family initially thought they had stumbled onto the victim of a crime at the time there was a boy in copenhagen who had gone missing so the peak cut has feared that it may have been his remains that they have discovered the body was still covered in too much peat to distinguish any notable features but they could tell that it had a rope around its neck on monday police arrived on the scene they found out from the hoggards that the body had been buried about 60 meters away from solid ground in a location that showed no signs of recent digging add to that the fact that it was buried beneath two and a half metres of peat and the authorities suspected that the body might not have been as fresh as the family initially suspected and in fact it might be a matter for the super bowl museum rather than the police people from the museum showed up the next day and confirmed their suspicions they had a bog body on their hands and there was no way of telling how old it truly was without analyzing it in the lab this was due to the unique natural environment found in peat bogs the main culprit is peat moss the plant that is ubiquitous in such areas it creates something called bog acid which can impede the development of bacteria this plus the anaerobic or low oxygen environment creates an ideal scenario where organic material barely decomposes so bodies stay remarkably well preserved for countless years after they die the local press was all over the news but it needed a catchy name for the unidentified body some of them called it the man from bogville although at the time it was still not certain yet that the body belonged to a man or a woman the remains were found at that town that i named that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue so instead archaeologist pv glob decided to name the body after a small nearby village where the whole guards came from and well so the world was introduced to the ptolem man at the time of the discovery bog bodies were not a new concept in fact a different body known as elling woman had been found a short distance from the ptoleman just 12 years prior plenty of others had been discovered throughout europe and denmark in particular proved to be a rich resource of such anomalies but the natural preservation of these remains turned out to be the easy part because then came the difficult task of actually removing the tollen man from the bog and taking it to a laboratory or without completely destroying it just like the mummies of egypt great care was needed when removing these bodies from the environment they survived in for thousands of years otherwise exposure to regular atmospheric conditions could have had an immediate and irreversible damaging effect on the remains up until then this hadn't really been done successfully on a bog body before at least not on one that was intact and in such good condition as the top man there was one notable exception and she was called the harold scale woman found all the way back in 1835 this body of a woman was so well preserved that it still contained every organ for some reason people at the time believed that the body must belong to queen gunhild of norway an important figure in the icelandic sagas therefore king frederick vi ordered that she be given an exclamation worthy of a royal so her remains were carefully removed intact and placed inside a fancy coffin although completely unintentional this had the fortuitous side effect of preserving the body in good condition she wasn't queen gunhill by the way in fact she just came from the iron age and lived about 1 500 years earlier than the queen but her remains had been maintained well enough that even in the year 2000 when scientists re-examined her with new technology they could still tell what food was in her stomach it was blackberries and unhusked millet in case you were wondering anyway the point is that danish authorities wanted to be extra careful with removing the taller man from his slumber in the bog because specimens like him did not come along that often his head in particular was in a state of preservation unlike anything seen before or after for that matter other examples even the howard scare woman still looked like mummies the taller man however did not his nose still retained its shape his eyelids had not sunken into the sockets you could still see the furrows on his brow you could still see his hair and even the faintest traces of beard stubble the transportation of the body was handled by people from the silkborg museum plus the two brothers who found it as well as a few policemen the first thing they did was dig around the remains so the taller man was left elevated on a peak platform they then placed the box he would be carried in around him but without the top or the bottom afterwards they started inserting planks underneath the box one by one to make the bottom and finally they placed the lid on this way they had the taller man in a box ready to be transported to the national museum of denmark in copenhagen but nobody had actually touched him and he was still encased in the same pete that he had been for countless ages now before we continue with today's video let me thank today's sponsor curiosity stream curiosity stream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals curiosity stream is available on many platforms and web apps including roku android xbox one smart tvs ios chromecast amazon fire amazon kindle apple tv it's a long list it's offered worldwide and it's constantly updated with amazing timely content right now for instance they have a popular new documentary series called the top science stories of 2020. obviously it features profiles on copic 19 but it also dives into crispr the mars rover fossilized dna and several other exciting things that you might have missed last year if you like a good corpse story and you're enjoying today's video i might recommend 30 episodes of crime scene solvers a series that's available to watch on curiosity stream plenty of decomposing mutilated or just generally weird or gross dead bodies for you weirdos on there right now you go to curiositystream.com biographics for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series for only 2.99 a month or 19.99 for the whole year and right now is a special deal for you guys you can get 30 days as a trial to try it out just use code biographics at checkout let's get back to today's video at the museum in copenhagen the examination of the bog body began as scientists laboriously removed the peat bit by bit so as not to cause any damage the remains eventually they were able to get a full picture of what the tom man actually looked like the first thing to notice was that the body was not as well preserved as the head it had shrunk but this was to be expected the left side in particular was partially decomposed because it was the side that faced upwards in the bog as the body sat in the fetal position the arms and hands were almost completely skeletonized the right side of the face fed much better and even the skin remained intact for the most part the tall man had a pointed leather cap on his head it had been made from eight separate pieces of sheepskin which was sewn together and the fur side had been turned inwards there were also two leather straps on the sides which were tied together under the chin to keep the hat in place underneath his cap the taller man had short hair a few centimeters in length it was red as was his beard stubble but this coloration was due to the bog water and not his natural hair color other than his cap the taller man was naked which was odd since most other bog bodies had been found either wearing clothes or having their clothes placed on top or next to them there are a few possible explanations for this one one he was thrown in the bog naked two his clothes had been placed next to him and over millennia due to peak digging or some other reason they had drifted away and become lost three the most likely scenario was that his clothes simply rotted away he might have been wearing only a simple tunic made out of vegetable fibers which would not have survived in the acidic environment of the bog the idea is reinforced by the fact that the tollen man did have a leather belt made of oxide tied around his waist it seems unlikely that someone would have stripped him naked but left his belt on lastly there was also the rope tied around his neck it doesn't really count as clothing or accessories it more likely was the murder weapon but the cap the belt and the rope are the only items that were found were the taller man [Music] by examining the body scientists were able to determine the age of the taller man when he died mainly this was established by analyzing his teeth as well as other tell-tale signs such as the presence of adhesions on the skull and coccyx and arthritis of the sternum which showed that the taller man had the early stages of costochondritis today those symptoms would suggest a person of 40 but that is in our modern world while the biological aging of the body would occur at a faster rate a thousand years ago therefore the taller man's age was revised a bit downward and estimated to be between 30 and 40 years at the time of his death he measured 161 centimeters in height when he was excavated or five foot three but he almost certainly lost a few centimeters due to shrinkage during his time in the bog so he would have been taller in real life and probably of average height for that era x-rays revealed that the interior had been just about as well preserved as the exterior all the organs were still there although they had lost volume and had been flattened by the pressure inside the peat bog the brain was intact although it too had shrunken due to loss of moisture the vertebrae were unbroken although all signs pointed to the taller man having been hanged but this was harder to say with certainty due to advanced decalcification of the bones scientists took special interest in the stomach and the large intestine since it wasn't every day that they were able to directly analyze the diet of a prehistoric man they managed to extract around 250 mls or eight and a half ounces of stomach content that constituted the tolerance last meal which he consumed 12 to 24 hours before his death as it had already made its way through the stomach and into the large intestine it consisted of a porridge made of barley flaxseed and seeds from various plants such as knotweed oat and a herb known as gold of pleasure decades later one british archaeologist tried recreating the mill for a bbc program and described it simply as disgusting now we arrive at the big question how old is the ptoleman when the borg body was originally discovered carbon dating was still a few years away from being developed so scientists were unable to provide us with an accurate answer immediately by analyzing pollen samples taken from around the body during the excavation all they could really say was that the taller man was younger than the stone age but then carbon dating became a thing and several tests all placed the bog body sometime between 2200 and 2400 years ago during the early iron age also known as the pre-roman era of northern europe as the technology kept improving the dating became more accurate the most recent tests performed just a few years ago narrowed the window down even further by using accelerator mass spectrometry on bone collagen samples recovered from the tolerance femur and rib scientists stated the femur to 2 330 years ago plus or minus 23 years and the rib roughly the same this plus all the previous data put the birth of the ptoleman somewhere between 405 and 380 bc while some scientists were busy conducting all kinds of high-tech tests on the tollum man's body to gather all the information they could other archaeologists and forensic examiners wanted to study the case from a different perspective that of a murder there is after all little doubt that the taller man died by hanging even if the cervical vertebrae were not broken contrary to popular belief this does not always happen it is the main difference between the long drop and the short drop methods of hanging the long drop which was adopted much later in history was considered the more humane approach by dropping the condemned from a higher distance the impact was greater and was designed to break the neck resulting in a faster death the downside to this technique was that sometimes the impact was too great either because the executioner misjudged the distance or because of the weight of the condemned and the drop caused the head to pop clean off the wild west outlaw black jack ketchum is an infamous example of this happening although in his case the drop was too high and the rope was too rigid anyway with the short drop there was no care given to the height from which the condemned was dropped because they were going to be killed by suffocation and that is what happened to the taller man scientists also found some distension at the tongue which is another sign consistent with suffocation multiple forensic specialists have examined the bog body and they all agreed that he was killed by hanging but the other question of course is why they can only speculate on this point since we have little to no information about the people of northern europe from that time period tacitus the roman historian gave us a good idea when he wrote down accounts of roman traders who ventured into the north and encountered the tribes there he said that traitors and renegades hang in those trees cowards gutless and unnatural fornicators pressed down under a wicker hurdle into the slimy mud of a bog sure tacitus wrote about 400 years after the tolland man was already dead but his point was still valid could the totem man have been executed for being a criminal or a traitor it is possible but scholars think it's unlikely due to the care that was shown to him after his death they reckon that if the taller man was despised by the people who killed him they would not have carried him to the peat bog afterwards and placed him in a sleeping fetal position not to mention that some think that they also closed his eyes and mouth to give him a more peaceful demeanor the alternative that most scholars consider most likely was that the tollen man was some kind of human sacrifice they don't know why he was chosen or what god he was sacrificed to but the circumstantial evidence seems to point in that direction for starters we know from roman historians that sacrificing humans was practiced by the various tribes of the north then there are also the circumstances of the ptoleman's bog burial starting with the fact that he was buried in the first place archaeological evidence indicates that northern european tribes during the iron age mainly practiced cremation while some people of high status were placed in caskets and buried alongside their treasured possessions neither of these applied to the taller man which means that he belonged to a special group and the only one we know of is human sacrifices it's still a long way from a definitive answer but we're probably never going to know for certain [Music] the story of the ptoleman has continued and evolved in the seven decades since he was dug out of the pete bogg and new chapters are always being added mainly as technology progresses despite their best efforts scientists were not able to preserve tall and man as they found him they simply did not have the technology or the know-how back in 1950 plus some scholars were worried that it looked a bit too carb to display like that since the left half had partially decomposed that is why they focus on saving the head they were successful they carefully severed the head from the rest of the body and developed a new preservation technique which involved replacing all the bog water cells in his head with wax so that it retained its exact shape however this could not be done directly since the tube wouldn't mix so instead they first had to put the head in alcohol to replace the bog water next then was put in a dissolution liquid named tulalol to replace the alcohol and then in liquid paraffin to replace the tulle only after that could it finally be placed in melted beeswax which inserted itself into the cells of the head and replaced the paraffin this new process was successful and the head of the tollen man remains looking just as the day it was dragged out of the bog although it had shrunk by 12 the limbs and the torso however did not undergo this process instead they were dried out split into pieces and sent for various tests and autopsies a few decades after the discovery during the 1980s scientists thought that maybe they could try and assemble the whole body it began the bizarre quest to try and find all the missing parts which had been sent to various museums and institutes eventually they managed to find everything except the internal organs and one toe from the right foot which had clearly been sawed off the location of the toe remained a mystery until 2016 when a woman named bert brossen christiansen called the silkenborg museum and told them that she had the ptoleman's big toe she was right too tests showed that the mummified toe in her possession was a perfect match the one missing from the foot so how did she end up owning the severed toe of a 2 400 year old bog body as it turns out her father borg borsen christiansen was one of the people who worked on researching new preservation methods for the taller man burr remembered quite vividly that when she was growing up her father had a whole foot in a jar of blue liquid on his desk the toe he kept in a smaller jar which he'd like to carry around with him and even bring to the dinner table after he died his widow kept it and then it ended up with burt who reunited the toe with the rest of the talon man's body unfortunately despite their best efforts the reassembled body of the ptoleman was not fit for show one which is on display today at the silkborg museum is replica but the head is still the genuine article the internal organs are still missing though so if you happen to encounter a jar full of mummified organs on your travels the silkenborg museum might be interested in hearing from you so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching [Music] you