The original naturally mummified head of a Tollund man is on display at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark.
I’M unsure whether this article should have been entitled ‘Morbid Anatomy!’ For many a year I taught students about the natural properties of glaciers and peat bogs in the preservation of human remains.
My father first introduced me to the subject when he acquired in the 1950s an old copy of National Geographic magazine. A detailed article therein, on the discovery of the corpse of the Tollund man, in a Danish peat bog, fascinated me.
Last May 22, The Borneo Post reported: ‘New Zealand glacier body identified after 42 years’. On the South Island’s Tasman glacier, in the Aoraki Mt Cook National Park, this is not unusual as bodies often reappear at the snout of that glacier.
What have glaciers and peat bogs in common?
Glaciers are no more than layers of compacted snow with water frozen into ice thus creating an anaerobic (oxygen-less) condition for the preservation of human and animal remains. Peat bogs are usually composed of a water-loving bryophyte, sphagnum moss, which exudes an antibacterial substance that lowers the rate of decay of materials in the peat. With further overlying moss growth in creating subsequent layers of peat and through compression, anaerobic conditions are again created.
Bodies found on Mount Everest
Mount Everest’s Base Camp and the tragic loss of life through an avalanche triggered by the Nepalese earthquake in April this year together with the loss of 14 Sherpa’s lives in 2014 brought the hazards of high mountaineering to the world’s media. Few people realise that this base camp is at the foot of the ever-moving Khumbu glacier with its changing seracs (ice pinnacles) and deep crevasses (ice chasms).
The positions of these features change daily, so at about 3am to 4am before an expedition can navigate the Khumbu icefalls, Sherpas are out risking their lives in securing horizontal aluminium ladders across these chasms. The crevasses in the moving glacier are prone to closure and many a Sherpa has fallen to his death only to be crushed by the moving glacier ice. With climate change and rapidly melting glaciers in the late 20th and 21st centuries, many preserved but crushed bodies now emerge from the melting snout of that glacier.
Chinese climbers on the Tibetan side of the mountain have found frozen bodies of former climbers. Perhaps the most recent discovery was that of George Mallory’s body. Mallory disappeared with Andrew Irvine on the North East ridge of Mt Everest on June 8, 1924. His preserved body was discovered on May 1, 1997 at 8,157 metres, just 245 metres vertically below the summit.
It is still debated in mountaineering circles as to whether Mallory and Irvine were the very first mountaineers to conquer ‘The Roof of the World’. The discoverers of his body noted that he was frozen, mummified and sun-bleached. His snow goggles were found in his coat pocket, suggesting that it must have been night when both climbers were descending the mountain and fell to their deaths causing a break to Mallory’s right leg. Mallory was identified by the name tags sewn into the collars of his clothes and in 1999, after a short funeral service, laid to rest under a pile of stones on the mountain that had beckoned him back for his third attempt.
The late Chinese climber, Wang Hungbae, in 1975, had reported finding “an English dead” at 8,100 metres on Everest. Could it have been Andrew Irvine’s body? We still await the outcome of this discovery.
The Otzi Ice Man
I hiked and clambered along the Otztal-Gurgler valley with my family in August 1992 setting off from one of the highest Austrian Tyrol mountain villages — Obergurl. Our aim was to see the nearby Italian border and Mt Similaun. In the previous year, a German couple had discovered, purely by accident, a human body which was partially uncovered in melting ice near that high altitude mountain.
Upon reporting it to the local police a murder investigation began. The exhumed body, which was drilled out of the ice, revealed to forensic scientists that it was of a 45-year-old man who was likely to have been a copper miner and who had died about 5,300 years ago! His clothing and shoes were well preserved by the ice and artefacts retrieved near his body included a longbow and arrows, a copper axe, and a flint bladed knife. Further DNA analysis found that his intact blood cells linked him to the place of his birth. With an arrow wound to his shoulder, it is likely that he suffered a violent death. Yet again there is still a mystery as to the actual cause of his death.
Climbers make their way along the Khumbu icefalls.
Peat bog excavations
Peat, an embryonic form of coal, has also revealed its secrets. These have varied from fossilised tree trunks, pollen grains, and Roman plank pathways across marshy areas to human bodies – all fossilised by nature.
The mummified corpse of Tollund man, found in West Jutland, was again discovered perchance by peat diggers buried beneath two metres. He was dated to have died about 5,000 years ago and his clothing, too, was well preserved. He wore a cap of sheepskin with hide chin straps. Alas, he had a noose of plaited animal hide around his neck suggesting that he died of hanging and his dead body was then cast into a nearby peat bog for disposal.
Was he a criminal or a human sacrifice? Who knows but the archaeological debate still continues. We do know that his heart, liver and lungs were preserved including his stomach’s contents containing a type of porridge.
In August 1984 the Lindow man, or jokingly referred to initially as ‘Pete (Peat) Marsh’, was discovered by a mechanical peat cutter and has been dated at being about 2,000 years old. He was located at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, North West England. There a Moss, in local parlance means a peat bog and it is thought that he may have been garrotted, as a sinuous cord was found around his neck suggesting foul play.
In both the Tollund man’s and the Lindow man’s discoveries, a woman’s partial body had been excavated a few years earlier. Interestingly more than 100 peat buried bodies have been uncovered in England and Wales and over 30 in Scotland. With over 14 per cent of Sarawak’s land area composed of peat land, I wonder how many ancient human remains will be discovered in future years as peat is a combustible substance and when dried out can be used to generate thermal electricity.
Forensic archaeologists are still working on the corpses I have mentioned. Glaciers, snowfields, and peat bogs will, I am sure, continue to reveal further clues of human life in past times. Cryonics, derived from a Greek word meaning ice cold, as a form of the preservation of bodies is not a 20th century invention for it was invented by nature many, many moons ago.
For further reading pick up ‘Paths of Glory’ by Jeffrey Archer (2009) and ‘The Man in the Ice’ by Konrad Spindler (2013).