Mummies Frozen in Time (Full Episode) | DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL | National Geographic

NARRATOR: The Andes mountains, northwest Argentina, 1999. National Geographic explorer Johan Reinhard and a team of climbers ascend a 22,000-foot volcano, Llullaillaco, in search of evidence of Inca child sacrifice. REINHARD: We had mummies that were going to be unique in the world, and that would give us information about the Inca culture that we could never get in any other way. NARRATOR: May 15, 2003: workers digging peat in the Irish midlands are startled to find a human torso. Examiners rush to the scene and identify the body as a murder victim, from 2,000 years ago. KELLY: I mean, we have to be mindful, you know, that there's a human tragedy and a reality behind all of this. NARRATOR: 1988. An American scholar traveled to China's western hinterlands. His destination: a provincial museum. MAIR: I came upon this room, which was just full of mummies. I was overwhelmed. That's my brother there or somebody like my brother from 3,000 years ago. NARRATOR: Three stories from across the ancient world. Corpses naturally preserved in unique environments, in near perfection. Where they're found, and how they died, remains part of the mystery. BECKETT: In a sense, each of these individuals, regardless what information they give us, from an investigative point of view, they're time capsules. They're frozen in time. NARRATOR: Just 82 feet below the summit of Llullaillaco, expedition leader Johan Reinhard unearths an Inca burial site. REINHARD: Once we got under that initial frozen layer, then our hopes rose quickly because soon statues started to appear. And once you start getting statues in a platform like that, you begin to have more hopes of being able to find a human sacrifice, a mummy. NARRATOR: But today not one mummy, but three, all frozen in tombs that touch the sky. One child burned. Another tied up. A third appears to have simply fallen asleep. These mummies pose uncomfortable questions for the living: What happened on this mountaintop 500 years ago? Can modern science shed light on a mysterious Inca ritual and reveal the story of these three children? Today, the children of Llullaillaco are here at the museum of high altitude archaeology in Salta, Argentina. Because of the children's delicate state, they are rarely moved or touched, let alone studied. BECKETT: It's very important to keep them in the state of preservation that they were in when they were first discovered. It's only in that way that we can get as much information as we can. NARRATOR: Forensic pathologist Angelique Corthals has been given unprecedented access. Corthals hopes these frozen corpses can tell us how they lived and died. But she'll have to hurry, she has only a short time before the children must return to their temperature-controlled capsules. CORTHALS: What's amazing about these bodies is that they're absolutely perfect. All their organs are there, you can see their lungs, you can see their heart. Most incredibly, you can see their brain, which is unheard of for, for mummies. NARRATOR: They call this child El Niño. He was just seven years old. Today, he weighs a mere 22 and a half pounds, about half of what he would've weighed when alive. CORTHALS: There are so many mysteries about these children. The boy is the only one out of the three who is tied up. He may have been tied up either while still alive but somehow drugged, or right after death. Was the boy alive by the time he made it to the top or was he dead? And that's a very big question. NARRATOR: If Corthals can answer that question, she may uncover the nature of these sacrifices, violent or merciful. These children, specially chosen for their purity, are believed to have marched almost 1,000 miles to their death. Led on an epic journey that began in Cusco, the heart of the empire, ending at the peak of Llullaillaco. The equivalent of walking from the Mexican border to Canada. REINHARD: When you put it into perspective of the kind of terrain they had to get across, and it's an incredible accomplishment, in and of itself, totally apart from getting to the summit of the mountain. NARRATOR: Scientists estimate the journey may have begun six months before they died. Through the winds of the Altiplano and terrain crawling with predators, And across the driest desert on the planet, the Atacama. Keeping these three children alive was the one goal in mind. 500 years later, Angelique Corthals is investigating their deaths. A stain around the boy's mouth catches the scientist's eye. It could be the residue of chicha, an alcoholic drink made from maize. Or it could be blood. CORTHALS: If this is blood, then we know he's being violently killed. If it's chicha, he fell asleep. It could be both, it could be vomit or it could be blood, but it really looks like congealed blood right now. NARRATOR: If he was drugged, he may have been mercifully unaware of the sacrifice taking place. CORTHALS: He's also actually fairly peaceful if you look at him, but of course the stain area here is going to really determine whether he died a violent death or not. We're kind of hoping that he died peacefully. I'm really hoping for chicha rather than blood. NARRATOR: With time already running short, they must say goodbye to the young boy. And invite the girl they call the maiden, or Doncella, out of her frozen home. CORTHALS: She looks like she's just sleeping and that she's going to wake up in the next minute. And you just want to ask her a question, it's just a feeling that she's really gonna come back and answer your question. NARRATOR: It's been several years since Corthals last saw her. CORTHALS: And I can see already the Doncella has grown a little bit more saggy than she used to be. She's aging a little less gracefully than the other mummies, but it's probably because she's also an older patient. NARRATOR: The Doncella's hair was elaborately braided just before she died, perhaps as part of the sacrificial ceremony. CORTHALS: Let me see if there's any hair that's... NARRATOR: Corthals selects a hair sample. CORTHALS: Hey, look, this, this is, um, a white hair. Look, look, look, she had white hair. That's the Doncella's hair. This is very unusual for a 15-year-old, to have gray or white hair. Es muy bizarre. It can be due to genetics, I mean, some young people do have white hair at a very early age, but it can also be due to stress and that would be quite interesting. NARRATOR: Information obtained from hair samples reveals what these children ate and how they lived in the months prior to death. CORTHALS: Okay, so now we are moving on, very quickly because we only have 15 minutes to finish the entire Doncella. NARRATOR: A small amount of time to get eyebrow hair, skin color testing and deep tissue analysis. CORTHALS: I'm feeling that people around me are feeling nervous. Alright. Okay, so this is good. Okay, and this is, again, trying to make it not visible. I'm very sorry, Doncella. So here I'm using the same hole to try to get to the actual muscle underneath the layer of fat, because of course the layer of fat doesn't have any DNA in it. This is mainly for genetic analysis. NARRATOR: A spot of mucus under the girl's nose is a clue that her body was susceptible to infection. In fact, CT scans suggest that she was suffering from sinusitis and a bronchial infection when she died. And more recent scans hold a bigger surprise. After many months and almost 1,000 miles, the procession approached the sacred volcano. PRIEST: Orco. NARRATOR: For the Inca, these mountains were powerful gods... PRIEST: Huaco Llullaijaco. NARRATOR: Gods who controlled the weather and even their survival. To prepare the children for the exhausting climb, a combination of alcohol and stimulants may have been used. CORTHALS: If you look at the mouth of the Maiden, you'll notice that there are areas that are darker, almost as if she had applied make-up in the wrong, in the wrong way. These, um, spots, may actually reveal that there were traces, they contain traces of chicha. If it, if it's um, proven that it is chicha, then we will know more or less that the Maiden may have passed out under the effect of the alcohol. And if you pass out at 6,000 meters above sea level, you do not wake up. Muchas gracias, Doncella. NARRATOR: Corthals' time with the maiden is at an end. CORTHALS: As I was working, I was literally five centimeters from her face, gazing at her own eyes. And that was a very powerful moment. It was, just something I can't explain. I had this feeling coming in me, thinking "Ok, I know you. I know who you are". NARRATOR: They were now entering heights that were the realm of the gods. NARRATOR: The mountain ascent of the sacrificial children would have taken three to four days. CORTHALS: Llullaillaco is at over 6,000 meters, so the children were not accustomed to these type of altitudes, and their bodies would have struggled to grasp the last bit of oxygen they could possibly catch. So, by the time they came to the top of the mountain, it's very likely that they suffered quite a lot of physiological changes. NARRATOR: At more than 22,000 feet above sea level, atmospheric pressure drops by almost 50%. The brain struggles for oxygen. Breathing becomes labored. Hallucinations, crippling headaches and vomiting may all follow. CORTHALS: All of these symptoms would have been terrible for these little children. NARRATOR: To help the children survive the ascent to the summit, they were given coca leaves to chew. CORTHALS: The coca is a stimulant. It helps your body assimilate the small amount of oxygen much better than it would at, without the effect of the coca. NARRATOR: Hair analysis of all three children shows high levels of coca. The maiden had three and a half times more in her system than any other South American mummy. And recent CT scans reveal why. It's something no previous image had picked up. BECKETT: You can see a large roll of coca clenched between her teeth on the left side of her face. It was there when she died, and it's still there today. NARRATOR: Suffering from sinusitis and a bronchial infection, the coca boosts her respiratory system, helping her to breathe. BECKETT: See, to me it was a sign they were very concerned about her well-being. Coca was used in the Inca for... because they cared. Because it relieved pain, it relieved tension. So, they gave her coca to help her face the sacrifice that was before her. NARRATOR: At last, high on the mountain summit, the final question in this fateful journey: How did these children die? Disturbingly, the stain from around the boy's mouth proves to be blood. CORTHALS: We all took a step back saying, "Whoa, we're talking about a little kid that was killed violently." So, it was quite sad. NARRATOR: But results from the hair sample analysis on the maiden, together with new evidence of coca still in her mouth, suggest she was heavily sedated or recently dead once entombed. CORTHALS: It's reassuring to most of us because it's a peaceful death. And when you look at the Maiden, she does look very peaceful. She looks like she literally fell asleep and never woke up. NARRATOR: To modern eyes, they seem like victims. But for the Inca, the children of Llullaillaco have been blessed with a precious gift: Eternal life with the gods. Violent ends by sacrifice or punishment is nothing new to humankind. Scattered in the bogs of northern Europe are hundreds of Iron Age mummies. By all appearances, most met a violent end. Were they criminals or outcasts executed for crimes against society? Today, scientists believe there's a more complex explanation, involving little known rituals from a pre-Christian time. Superstitions, and what to us is the most taboo of rites, human sacrifice. The bog bodies themselves hold the answers. BECKETT: We still don't know completely that they were outsiders, outcasts, some anomaly, criminals, or if they were sacrifices. There is a lot of information now suggesting that they were more often sacrificed. NARRATOR: Six to eight feet below the peat bogs is the Iron Age layer where most of the bodies are found. The bodies mummified through a complicated process. Many of them were placed in shallow graves. Cold water seeped in rapidly, and the body may have been covered with peat. Once immersed, the body was preserved by bacteria-killing acid, courtesy of the sphagnum moss in the water. Layers of plants sealed the body into an oxygen-free world. The result: nature has preserved many of these bodies so perfectly, they are sometimes mistaken for recent murder victims... REPORTER (over TV): Good evening, peat cutters, working at Tollund in north Jutland in Denmark, reported to the police that they had found a body. NARRATOR: But this body wasn't buried a few months or years ago. It's 2400 years old. They dub it Tollund Man. He wears just a hat, a belt, and a noose around his neck. His peaceful expression looks more like a man napping than a man strangled. It was here that he struggled for his last breath. On that distant day, a life was taken. And a mystery was born. The question is whether the killers were avenging a crime, or appeasing a god? NARRATOR: Christian Fischer is the director of the Silkeborg museum in Denmark, the current resting place of the mummy Tollund Man. Dozens of objects have been found in the bog close to where the Tollund Man was discovered. Fischer believes they were all valuable offerings to pagan gods. NARRATOR: Archeologists have even found lumps of pure iron deliberately placed back in the bog after extraction. Fischer believes that villagers saw the iron ore as a gift from the gods. They returned the favor with valuable offerings of their own. The ultimate sacrifice would have been a human being. Fischer thinks that the Tollund Man's death by hanging, and his nakedness, were rituals required by the powerful god, Odin. NARRATOR: Fischer interprets these ancient gold cutouts of naked men as depictions of humans sacrificed to Odin. Circling their neck could be a noose. The downward feet may be hanging feet. The gentleness of his expression, as if he's only fallen asleep, suggests a loving hand closed his eyes and smoothed away signs of violence. Perhaps this honored his journey to the afterlife, as a gift to the pagan gods. But elsewhere in northern Europe, bog bodies show signs of a more traumatic and violent end. On a dark day, about 300 years before Christ, a young Irish noble was walked onto the bog. He would never return. KELLY: It must have been absolutely terrifying, a chilling experience, and being taken across the surface of this bog. He would have been closely watched. It would have been difficult to run away or escape this type of terrain. NARRATOR: His dreams of a kingdom may have ended that day. But his body lived on. His torso languished in an Irish bog for over two millennia, until discovered in 2003. The body was identified as an Iron Age mummy. Found near Croghan Hill in the Irish midlands, he is dubbed "Old Croghan Man." His head and legs were never found. What remains, however, is in remarkably good condition. Forensic testing tells us that he was likely a man in his 20s. By measuring the length of his arms, pathologists estimated that he towered at a height of six feet, six inches. He was probably an aristocrat. Well-manicured fingernails point to his having lived a privileged life. A Celtic armlet is also a sign of rank. Yet, for reasons unknown, this young nobleman was brutally slaughtered. A deep stab to the chest punctured his right lung. KELLY: That would have put him down on the ground. That was a fatal injury. He wouldn't have died immediately from that. He may then have been hit on the head with an axe. His head was removed. The lower part of his body was removed. Cutting a man in half would have been quite a task as well. So certainly, whoever did this seemed to be quite accomplished at what they were doing. NARRATOR: Yet to Ned Kelly, the most remarkable feature of this bizarre corpse is not his disfigurement, it is where he was found. NARRATOR: Croghan Hill is an ancient site where Irish kings were inaugurated. Bogs often coincide with the borders of these kingdoms, and it's no coincidence. KELLY: Imagine those bogs before they were drained. They're dangerous swamps, they're mires. You could disappear down into a bog hole and that would be the end of you. So, bogs make natural boundaries because they're difficult to cross. NARRATOR: Medieval texts say a king is responsible for the land's fertility. Specifically, a good king symbolically marries the fertility goddess to ensure bountiful supplies of grain and milk. But if the harvest failed, the king was seen as failing too. Could this explain the fate of Old Croghan Man? KELLY: It may be that Old Croghan Man was a failed king, in which case he would be deposed and sacrificed to the goddess whom he had failed and by the people whom he had failed. NARRATOR: If Old Croghan Man was a deposed king, Kelly believes that he was slaughtered within sight of Croghan Hill... As the new king rode to the top. After death, Old Croghan Man was ritually dismembered. Kelly believes that his head and legs were distributed along an ancient border, in the deep of a bog. In this way, the new king evoked his symbolic marriage to the earth goddess and marked his territory, both in this world and beyond. KELLY: There's this strange environment. So, I think in taking somebody who was to be killed to such a location and, you know, you're not just inserting them into the boundary of your territory, but I think you're placing them in a space between this world and the next perhaps. NARRATOR: What's left of Old Croghan Man's corpse shows bizarre wounds that may also have ritual significance. Twisted hazel ropes known as withies were threaded through holes in his upper arms. KELLY: So, we know that that's a post-mortem injury. It happened after he died. NARRATOR: In addition to being bound with ropes, Old Croghan Man's nipples appear to be nearly sliced off. According to Kelly, the suckling of a king's nipples was an important gesture of submission during the Iron Age. Removing the nipples may have demonstrated that Old Croghan Man could never be king. KELLY: There's a very controlled approach to what has been done to these bodies. It's not somebody going into a frenzy and just leaving multiple injuries. NARRATOR: Kelly believes that Old Croghan Man was a sacrifice that satisfied both ritual and political ends. KELLY: We're at a murder scene. I mean, we have to be mindful, you know, that there's a human tragedy and a reality behind all of this. NARRATOR: Today, more than ever, the bog bodies reach out to us. As science uncovers their darkest secrets, one essential truth remains unchanged. KELLY: The bog mummies remind us of ourselves. You could look at these big hands that perhaps held a lover or held a child or held a weapon, but they were very, very much in the here and now. NARRATOR: Mummies reveal truths about how and where ancient humans lived. Some reveal truths about where they traveled. In 1988, an American scholar traveled to China's western desert. In a provincial museum, he found Caucasian remains. MAIR: I was totally unprepared for what I saw that day. I thought I was just going to go through and look at pots and tools and the usual sort of things you'd see in a museum. NARRATOR: Victor Mair, an expert on ancient Chinese texts, was about to make the find of a lifetime. Their faces preserved as if they were the recent dead. Yet, according to the museum, they were thousands of years old. MAIR: There was one mummy in particular that I couldn't tear myself away from. And I just really gazed into his eyes and I almost cried. I think I did, thinking, "That's my brother there or somebody like my brother from 3,000 years ago." NARRATOR: A six-foot-tall giant with Caucasian features, found in China. It was a discovery that, for Mair, turned myth into reality. MAIR: I had heard from old Chinese history books that there were strange looking people out in the Far West of China, but now I was looking at them face to face, eye to eye, trying to make sense of it. NARRATOR: The riddle was, how did they get here? NARRATOR: The west and ancient China were long believed to have developed separately some 3,000 years ago. No direct contact. No significant trade. Two different worlds, growing in isolation from one another. Between them, ringed by immense mountains, is the Tarim Basin. Some believed the region could mark a potential link between east and west. MAIR: For 20 or 30 years, I had been saying that the East and the West were connected. And people used to say, "Well, where's the smoking gun?" NARRATOR: But from the moment they were unearthed, the mummies challenged long-held beliefs. Based on previous archaeological finds, many Chinese scholars believed the Chinese people evolved separately from all others. These Caucasian mummies didn't fit into this story. They were politically sensitive. And lay, all but ignored, in a dark room of a remote museum. Until they were rediscovered. MAIR: Somehow, I felt that there was something communicating to me from their bodies and from their faces. They weren't just a piece of dried flesh, that they were meant to tell us something about the past. NARRATOR: To decipher this strange origin mystery, investigators would need to reach deep into the archaeological record, and into the mummies themselves, using 21st century DNA analysis. JIN: It's like certain mummies were chosen to serve as a messenger, to deliver their side of the story. NARRATOR: Felix Li Jin of Shanghai's Fudan University is one of China's leading population geneticists and a part of National Geographic's genographic project team. Jin has helped develop and refine DNA sampling technology. JIN: The tools that we developed now have been used by detectives, by police officers to get the bad guys. Now we are working with the mummies and the work that we are doing is very much like detectives. NARRATOR: But can this same technology identify the origins of 4,000-year-old corpses? The first step is to get the DNA. However, even with bodies so well preserved, that's no simple task. Over time, DNA breaks down and the encoded information vanishes. JIN: I told Dr. Lee that I want to see some muscles with redness on it, the bloodstains. And then, after I saw the good quality muscles that he pulled out, I was so happy. NARRATOR: Their biggest hopes lie with this body, a mummy known as Cherchen Man. He is among the best preserved of all the mummies, surviving 3000 years in remarkable condition. MAIR: The people who buried him took great care to ensure that his body would survive. NARRATOR: His body was anointed with a balm; his face painted with symbols of the sun. His chin and hands were bound. It is evidence of the careful treatment of the deceased, of a man worthy of ceremony. MAIR: The fact that they invested so much effort and resources meant that they realized that death was forever. Death was eternal. NARRATOR: In Shanghai, Jin is about to start the most difficult task. From just a handful of samples collected from a dozen mummies, he must begin to reconstitute the past. NARRATOR: Out of molecules thousands of years old, Felix Li Jin is now analyzing the mummies DNA. JIN: It's very challenging to work with an ancient specimen, probably more difficult than anything else I've ever worked with. NARRATOR: Jin is looking for small mistakes called markers along the long threads of DNA. Errors among the DNA strands of A's, C's, T's and G's. A pattern as unique as a written page. BECKETT: Imagine a very long text like War and Peace. Now imagine having to copy that down by hand. It's late at night, you're tired, you're just about ready to go to bed, and you make a slight error. NARRATOR: An 'E' instead of a 'G'. This happens at the DNA level as well. Not very often, but when such small variations occur, they are passed down through generations. BECKETT: When we find these variations that gives us a marker that can tell us where that person came from. NARRATOR: The hard work finally pays off. JIN: We anticipated that all the mummies that we worked with carried the European side. And turns out, the result is not quite so. NARRATOR: The data shows lineages from all over Eurasia. JIN: Based on what we are seeing right now, it looks like Tarim Basin was the crossroad of a population migration. NARRATOR: A new picture emerges, one that is being refined by continuing lab work, but hints at connections from around the continent: markers from Europe, west Eurasia, and from Siberia, Tibet, Mongolia, even India. Despite their western appearance, these people weren't Celts, Or Vikings, Or any other group of Europeans transplanted into western China. Instead, the genetic material in the Tarim mummies hints at a complex blend from across the continent. A melting pot at the center of the world. It was a world we did not know existed. Generations before the silk road became an established route linking east and west, there was a world of trade, contact, interaction. Written into the very code of the mummies. MAIR: So, they were trading goods, they were trading ideas, they were trading genes. NARRATOR: Asian and European peoples may have been linked in ways we did not understand until now, exchanging ideas and technology as people moved in and out of the Tarim Basin. MAIR: These mummies are kind of a symbol for the connection of East and West, the connection of people all across Eurasia. And indeed, throughout the whole world. NARRATOR: A crossroads thought impossible existed here for thousands of years, then vanished. It's a connection we almost never learned of. But thanks to these China mummies, we can reimagine the journey of humankind across the globe. Lessons from these natural mummies will go on, for as long as they remain undamaged. And continue to uncover all that we share as human beings. BECKETT: So as technology evolves, as technique evolves, as ideas evolve, we can learn more and more. But we need to have the mummy intact. And that's why these are wonderful time capsules. They become our teachers. They let us know who we were.