National Geographic Tales of the Weird

by David Braun

  PIT BURIAL, PACIFIC NORTHWEST HAIDA

  The indigenous people of the American northwest coast would place their dead into a large open pit behind the village.

  VIKING BURIAL, SCANDINAVIA

  The Vikings were buried in large graves dug in the shape of a ship and lined with rocks.

  SPIRIT OFFERINGS, SOUTHEAST ASIA

  Most people are buried in the fields where they lived and worked. In Cambodia and Thailand, food and drink are left in “spirit houses” for the souls of passed relatives.

  PREDATOR BURIAL, EAST AFRICAN MAASAI

  While actual burial is reserved for chiefs as a sign of respect, common people are left outdoors for predators.

  SKULL BURIAL, KIRIBATI

  Skulls of the dead are kept on a shelf in the homes of these traditional islanders, who believe that the native god Nakaa welcomes the dead person’s spirit.

  CAVE BURIAL, HAWAII

  A traditional burial occurs in a cave, where the body is formed into a fetal position and covered with a tapa cloth made from mulberry bush bark.

  One, the Tibetan sky burial—thought to have originated several hundred years later—involves dismembering a body and exposing it to the elements and to scavengers such as vultures. Present-day Tibet is just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the cave tombs.

  The other funerary rite is older and hails from the Zoroastrian religion, which has its roots in ancient Persia (now Iran). Zoroastrians, Aldenderfer said, “are known to have de-fleshed their dead and fed the flesh to animals.”

  Ancient people living in the Upper Mustang region may have adopted funerary rituals of passing Zoroastrians as they traveled west, Aldenderfer said. These rites, in turn, may have transformed into, or inspired, the Tibetan sky-burial ritual. That idea, according to anthropologist Mark Turin, who wasn’t part of the project, is “an interesting and perfectly workable hypothesis.”

  Covert Caves

  The new finds are only the latest to be uncovered in the remote cliffs. In the 1980s, a Nepalese-German team discovered cave tombs dating back about 3,000 years. The human remains in those caves hadn’t been de-fleshed, however.

  And in 2009, the team behind the new discovery announced they’d found a cliff-cave trove of Tibetan art, manuscripts, and skeletons dating back to the 15th century.

  In addition to the newfound mortuary caves, Aldenderfer’s team has found nearby caves that were created later, likely for use as living spaces. “I don’t think the people who built those ‘apartment complexes’ actually knew that those mortuary caves were nearby,” Aldenderfer said.

  (Photo Credit 1.13)

  Bloodstained Landscape

  Turin, director of the Digital Himalaya Project at the University of Cambridge, said he’s not surprised that people have been repeatedly drawn to the Upper Mustang cliffs, despite the challenges.

  In fact, the isolation of the cliffs may have been an important part of their allure. Many of the local beliefs that have been practiced in the region, including Buddhism, place great value on the idea of religious retreat, Turin said. “Monks can now practice and reside in monasteries, but we’re talking about long before the establishment of any monastery,” he said.

  “These [caves] may well have been proto-monastic places … and as such, people might retreat or bury their dead there.”

  Also, Turin said, ancient people may have felt tied to the landscape in a way that might be hard for many modern Westerners to understand. Even today, “a well-known story is in circulation about the taming of the territory … When the Buddhist saints came up and slew the local deities, their blood and [body parts] stained the Earth and created the colors” of the landscape, Turin said.

  “The real issue is trying to understand when people came, where they came from, how they got here—all of these kinds of anthropological questions about human migration, movement across landscapes, especially in a landscape like this, which is really difficult.”

  Mark Aldenderfer

  archaeologist

  “The religious culture that exists in people’s minds can be mapped onto the landscape. This means that the landscape is sacred, and that caves and places of retreat are similarly sacred.”

  PORTAL TO ANOTHER REALM?

  Entrance to Maya Underworld

  Found in Mexico?

  A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been uncovered on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

  Stretching south from southern Mexico, through Guatemala, and into northern Belize, the Maya culture had its heyday from about A.D. 250 to 900, when the civilization mysteriously collapsed.

  According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife. The discovery of a subterranean maze has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the underground complex—or vice versa.

  TRUTH:

  THE MAYA BELIEVED THAT CAVES WERE THE SOURCE OF THE SUN AND MOON, GODS, AND RACES OF HUMANS, AND WERE THEREFORE CONSIDERED SACRED.

  Watery Caves

  Archaeologists excavating the temples and pyramids in the village of Tahtzibichen, in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, have found stones, tall columns, and sculptures of priests in the caves. They’ve also found human remains.

  Two team members work at the Maya “underworld” excavation site in Mérida. (Photo Credit 1.14)

  In one of the recently found caves, researchers discovered a nearly 300-foot (90-meter) concrete road that ends at a column standing in front of a body of water.

  “We have this pattern now of finding temples close to the water—or under the water, in this most recent case,” said Guillermo de Anda, lead investigator at the research sites.

  “These were probably made as part of a very elaborate ritual,” de Anda said. “Everything is related to death, life, and human sacrifice.”

  “For the Maya the body was a vehicle for the journey to the afterlife. When a Maya priest made a sacrifice, he was operating in his special universe—helping that universe to continue.”

  Alejandro Terrazas

  physical anthropologist

  Spirit’s Quest

  Researchers said the ancient legend—described in part in the sacred book Popul Vuh—tells of a tortuous journey through oozing blood, bats, and spiders that souls had to make in order to reach Xibalba, the underworld.

  “Caves are natural portals to other realms, which could have inspired the Maya myth. They are related to darkness, to fright, and to monsters,” de Anda said, adding that this does not contradict the theory that the myth inspired the temples.

  William Saturno, a Maya expert at Boston University, believes the maze of temples was built after the story.

  “I’m sure the myths came first, and the caves reaffirmed the broad time-and-space myths of the Mayans,” he said.

  Crossing Over and Under

  The discovery of the temples underwater indicates the significant effort the Maya put into creating these portals. In addition to plunging deep into the forest to reach the cave openings, Maya builders would have had to hold their breath and dive underwater to build some of the shrines and pyramids.

  Other Maya underworld entrances have been discovered in jungles and aboveground caves in northern Guatemala and Belize. “They believed in a reality with many layers,” Saturno said of the Maya. “The portal between life and where the dead go was important to them.”

  5,000-YEAR-OLD SCOTTISH TOMB

  Tomb of the Otters

  Filled With Stone Age Human Bones

  Thousands of human bones have been found inside a Stone Age tomb on a northern Scottish island, archaeologists say.

  A massive Scottish burial site on South Ronaldsay in the Orkney Islands remained hidden for 5,000 years until a home improvement project accidentally revealed its presence. The ancient grave was found after a homeowner had leveled a mound in his yard to
improve his ocean view. Authorities were alerted to the find in 2010 after a subsequent resident, Hamish Mowatt, guessed at the site’s significance.

  Mowatt had lowered a camera between the tomb’s ceiling of stone slabs and was confronted by a prehistoric skull atop a muddy tangle of bones. “Nobody had known it was an archaeological site before that,” said Julie Gibson, county archaeologist for Orkney.

  “It doesn’t seem to have been a problem that the otters were living in this tomb at the same time as the community that first built it.”

  Dan Lee

  Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (ORCA)

  Partial excavation of the site, called Banks Tomb, has confirmed it as the first undisturbed Neolithic burial to be unearthed in Scotland in some 30 years, Gibson reported. “It’s certainly unusual to find one whose contents are so well preserved,” the archaeologist said. “We have got the assorted remains of many, many people who have been deposited in this tomb at different times.”

  Entrance to the Tomb of the Otters (Photo Credit 1.15)

  Otter Intruders

  The underground grave consists of a 4- by 0.75-meter (13- by 2.5-foot) central chamber surrounded by four smaller cells hewn from sandstone bedrock. Capping the central chamber are large water-worn slabs supported by stone walls and pillars.

  At least a thousand skeleton parts belonging to a mix of genders and age groups—including babies—have been found to date. Layers of silt divide the remains, suggesting the tomb was in use for many generations, Gibson said.

  The site has also been dubbed the Tomb of the Otters because initial excavations revealed prehistoric otter bones and dung amid the human bones. The animal remains indicate that people visited the burial site only sporadically. “It suggests the tomb was not entirely sealed and that otters were trampling in and out a lot” throughout the tomb’s use, Gibson said. “For that to occur, you must think there was a gap of a year or two” between grave visits or burials.

  Every Bone Tells a Story

  So far the excavations, led by the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, have “barely scratched the surface,” Gibson added. The archaeologist is confident that the site will yield important new clues to Neolithic funerary practices. For instance, researchers hope that DNA and isotopic analysis of the human bones will reveal if the dead were closely related and came from the same tight-knit island community or if the burials include newcomers from overseas.

  Archaeologists will also investigate whether bones were removed from the tomb for ritualistic purposes. “This burial is absolutely packed with remains, but with most [other Stone Age tombs], there are actually not that many people in them at the end,” Gibson noted.

  Stone Age Not So Aquarian

  Meanwhile, recent studies of remains from the nearby Tomb of the Eagles suggest that life among Orkney’s Neolithic community of cattle farmers was much less harmonious than previously thought.

  At least 20 percent of skulls from that 5,000-year-old site—about a mile from the Tomb of the Otters—show signs of trauma consistent with violent blows from sharp and blunt-edged weapons.

  TRUTH:

  THE SMALLEST BONE IN THE HUMAN BODY IS SHORTER THAN A GRAIN OF RICE.

  Similar investigations are now being carried out on skeletons from the newfound site. “Neolithic life has had quite a sort of hippy image,” Gibson observed. “But it could be that we are looking at ritualized violence.”

  OFF WITH THEIR HEADS?

  Headless Romans in England

  Came From “Exotic” Locales?

  An ancient English cemetery filled with headless skeletons holds proof that the victims lost their heads a long way from home, archaeologists say.

  Unearthed between 2004 and 2005 in the northern city of York, 80 skeletons were found in burial grounds used by the Romans throughout the second and third centuries A.D. Almost all the bodies are males, and more than half of them had been decapitated, although many were buried with their detached heads.

  One of the headless Romans found in an ancient cemetery in York (Photo Credit 1.16)

  York—then called Eboracum—was the Roman Empire’s northernmost provincial capital during the time. In a new study of the ancient bones, Gundula Müldner of the University of Reading in the U.K. says the “headless Romans” likely came from as far away as Eastern Europe, and previous evidence of combat scars suggests that the men led violent lives. “The headless Romans are very different [physically] than other people from York,” Müldner said. “They come from all over the place. Some of them are quite exotic.”

  They Were What They Ate

  Müldner’s team analyzed the bones for chemical clues called isotopes, which are different versions of particular elements. Based on the geology and climate of where a person grew up, their bones hold telltale traces of isotopes absorbed from the local food and water.

  Oxygen and strontium isotopes in the bones of the headless Romans indicate that just 5 of the 18 individuals tested came from the York area, the team reports in the study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

  The rest of the men came from elsewhere in England or mainland Europe, possibly from France, Germany, the Balkans, or the Mediterranean.

  The suggestion that the headless Romans were a diverse bunch confirms previous archaeological findings. Kurt Hunter-Mann of the York Archaeological Trust, who led the original excavations, said, “We know that the population of Roman York is quite diverse anyway because a lot of traders, for example, were coming from various parts of the Empire,” he said. Solving the grisly puzzle of who the headless Romans were will require further bone analysis and forensic studies, still to be completed.

  TRUTH:

  FIFTY-ONE DECAPITATED VIKINGS WERE UNCOVERED IN A THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD EXECUTION PIT NEAR WEYMOUTH, ENGLAND, IN JUNE 2009.

  The Millet’s Tale

  Traces of carbon and nitrogen show that five of the headless Romans ate very different foods from York’s local population. And two individuals had a carbon signature from a group of food plants—including sorghum, sugarcane, and maize—not known to have been cultivated in England at that time. “We haven’t seen such a signature anywhere in Britain before” in the archaeological record, Müldner said.

  In fact, millet is the only food plant from this group that was being grown anywhere in mainland Europe, she added. The archaeologist noted that “the Romans were not very fond of millet, and often, when they established a new province, other cereals such as wheat would replace millet as the principally grown crop.”

  Müldner’s team thinks the headless millet-eaters hailed from colder climates, perhaps parts of Eastern Europe that were beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. “It might have been the Alps as well, or any higher mountains,” Müldner said.

  “At present our lead theory is that many of these skeletons are Roman gladiators … One of the most significant items of evidence is a large carnivore bite mark—probably inflicted by a lion, tiger or bear.”

  Kurt Hunter-Mann

  Archaeological Trust

  The Soldier Theory

  As for what the men were doing in York, previous theories had suggested the headless Romans were slain soldiers, imported gladiators, executed citizens, or ritually killed victims of a religious cult.

  Müldner’s team favors the military explanation: The ancient city had a large Roman garrison, and the skeletons show injuries consistent with armed combat. It’s possible the men were soldiers who had been executed, or who had been killed during battle and had their corpses—with or without heads—recovered for burial by their compatriots.

  The Gladiators

  Other recent research suggests the headless Romans were gladiators brought to the distant capital for entertainment. Evidence for this notion includes some skeletons’ unequal arm development—associated with the specialized use of single-handed weapons—and, on one skeleton, tooth marks from a large carnivore, possibly a gladiatorial lion or bear.

  “If the c
arnivore bite mark is indeed genuine, then, why not, they may indeed have been gladiators,” Müldner said. Hunter-Mann says he doubts the new study “will give us conclusive proof one way or another, but it’s all very useful.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Body Human

  (Photo Credit 2.1)

  Nothing may appear as ordinary as your own body, but if you take a closer look, things might start to look a little weird. Your brain, unbeknownst to you, might be “cat napping” while you’re awake. Your nose has the ability to sniff out the opposite sex. Your hair can tell scientists if you’re a morning person or a night owl. The human body constitutes its own frontier, with scientists discovering strange new things every day.

  PSSSSSTT!

  Superhuman Hearing Possible?

  Remember The Bionic Woman and her incredible eavesdropping abilities? Recent studies show that what was once science fiction could become an everyday reality.

  People may one day be able to hear what are now inaudible sounds, scientists say. New experiments suggest that just vibrating the ear bones could create shortcuts for sounds to enter the brain, thus boosting hearing.

  What’s the Frequency?

  Most people can hear sounds in the range of about 20 hertz (Hz) at the low end to about 20 kilohertz (kHz) at the high end. Twenty kHz would sound like a very high-pitched mosquito buzz, and 20 Hz would be what you’d hear if “you were at an R&B concert and you just stood next to the bass,” explained Michael Qin, a senior research scientist at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Connecticut. “It would be the thing that’s moving your pants leg.”