Bog Mysteries: Mummified Bodies and Frankenstein-Like Discoveries

In this fascinating episode of Wildly Curious, hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole unravel the eerie tale of ancient bog bodies found in South Uist, Scotland. These Bronze Age remains aren’t your typical archaeological find—they’re stitched-together puzzles of multiple individuals, preserved in bogs and buried beneath a 3,000-year-old house. Explore the mysteries behind these Frankenstein-like creations, how bogs preserve bodies with their unique chemistry, and the theories about why ancient people may have created such bizarre ancestral fusions.

Perfect for history buffs, archaeology enthusiasts, and anyone who loves a strange, unsolved mystery, this episode will leave you wondering about the secrets bogs still hold.

Transcript

Laura: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Wildly Curious, a podcast that tells you everything you need to know about nature, and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura.

Katy: And I'm Katy and we are going to today continue the Bog Chronicles. I don't know what else to call it. Um,

Laura: Bog. I feel like there needs to be some, it was Cave Chronicles.

Katy: Bog

Laura: Banter. Bog banter. But,

Katy: Bog banter. There we go. Bog banter. Ha ha ha. I was like, Buh buh buh buh buh. Buh buh buh buh. Ha ha ha ha. Bog banter. Uh, so we're just talking about, just like we did for the Cave Chronicles, where we just talked about cool things found in caves, we're just talking about weird things found in, found in bogs.

Laura: And if you're wondering what a bog is, listen to last week's episode, where Katy and Luke dive into what is a bog and what makes them special, blah, blah, blah.

Katy: Yeah, pretty, pretty easy stuff. Well, Laura, do you want to go first then? So we're just going to go, you know, Laura's going to do this week again. These are mini sodes in between, [00:01:00] uh, last season and the next season, which will start up in January. Uh, so these would just be really, really quick little short ones.

So Laura will do this week, I'll do next week, and then we'll alternate just like we did for the Cave Chronicles.

Laura: Yes, okay, so, um, we can preface this with, like Katy was saying last week, bogs preserve basically whatever you put into them. So, knowing that, I want to talk about the Clathhalan bodies.

Katy: Ooh, bodies.

Laura: bodies. Man, I just love a good body story. No.

Katy: Good bog body story.

Laura: Good bog body story. Um, okay. So where does this banter, where does this tale take place?

Um, South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, which is off the west coast of Scotland. So as I maybe you said last week Katy, there's a lot of bogs over in Great Britain. Um, it's just the type of the environment that there is. But um, these Outer Hebrides are islands. Uh, and it took, they found this at an archaeological site with [00:02:00] four Bronze Age roundhouses that were discovered in 2001.

Um, and the site is about 3, 000 years old with people living there from between 2, 000 BC to 1, 300 AD.

Katy: Okay.

Laura: Alright, so I said the stage. Now, the bodies. They found two bodies under the floor of the house. One man and one woman. Alright. The soil under the house though, it was like basically almost on a beach so the sand was super super, uh, sandy um Which would absolutely not have preserved these bodies.

So they were like they were like perfectly intact Um, so they looked mummified. So they they started diving in and and tried to figure out what was going on with these bodies So the man they just they think after radiocarbon dating, um was from 1500 bc And the woman was from 1300 B. C. Now, everything about this story is weird and cool, and I'm actually going to leave you with way more questions than answers.

Um, which [00:03:00] really sucks at this point. This is one of those at the end of, you know, when you go up to heaven and you're like, God, I have questions. One of these is now going to be this.

Katy: gotta have questions about these bodies that were found,

Laura: bodies. I need to know. Uh, it's, my questions are like, Easter Island, Roanoke Island, and now it's going to be

Katy: These bodies. Yeah. Okay.

Laura: don't know. So the woman, both of these bodies were in the fetal position intact. The woman was in the fetal position and cursory intact. Woman because of the pelvis that they could see. And she was holding two of her teeth, one in each hand. So her, I think it was her incisors, the left one in her left hand, the right one in her right hand.

All right, weird. Um, and then the man. Also was in the fetal position. Also appeared to be intact. But then they started, like,

Katy: was he holding his teeth?

Laura: No, he was

Katy: Okay. Cause I was like,

Laura: But way [00:04:00] weirder than that. Way weirder than that. Um, so, they started, like, really looking at him and, and putting some stuff together. Um, and they found out it wasn't just him, it was three people stitched together.

There.

Katy: Ah! What? Yeah.

Laura: uh, the skull was one person, the torso and limbs were the other person, and the jaw was the third person. All had died within 150 years of each other. So maybe not even at the same time, but within 150 years, stitched them together.

Alright? And then they were like, oh jeez, like. Maybe we should look at the woman a little bit closer. She's also a Frankenstein. Um, so they went back, they analyzed her. Her pelvis is clearly female, but the skull of a [00:05:00] man, the skull and mandibles of a man, and she, so she's at least two people, maybe more. Um, it was a little hard to read

Katy: So, so her, so her incisors were man incisors.

Laura: Oh yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She was holding, right, her pelvis was female but the skull was male. Meaning that the teeth, cause yeah, the teeth were missing from the skull. So, I don't know. So

Katy: that then means that like, at least in that one, in that case, if she's, if she was holding the teeth, like they had to have done that, that skull and all at the same time.

Laura: you'd think so, yeah. So, then they were like, holy crap, like, okay, so, What is the actual timeline of things that happened here? Because nothing is the same, okay? So, they can tell a lot of stuff from an archaeological site by dating different pieces. So, by dating the ashes and [00:06:00] cinders and ground up stuff in the floor of this house, they could tell that the house was 3, 000 years old.

But the bodies were at least 200 300 years older than that. so they were, they were, they died before the house, like the burial thing happened later. That was the last thing to happen. The first thing that probably happened was whatever happened with this man being put together, and then the woman later.

But by looking at the bodies and, and things, not only were they, they different and stitched together, they definitely found, from the evidence that they saw. They had, in order to be preserved like this, they would have had to have gone through some kind of mummification process. And the only way for that to happen anywhere like that, and with the, you know, the chemicals and debris that they found in a bog.

But very specifically, it's not just like these people fell into a bog, they were placed into a [00:07:00] bog and then removed. Because there is a timeline for being in a bog. Between 6 and 18 months, you have to be in there. It stops decomposition. It tans the skin and the sinew, but any longer than 18 months and the bones start to be replaced with minerals and that had not happened.

Um, so placed in, mummified, pulled out. That would then leave you with an intact mummy that you could leave out in the elements. So they think, and also by looking and seeing like the wear and tear on these bodies, that they had clearly been out and most likely on display

Katy: That's what I was gonna say, is it just, yeah, a display of some

Laura: 200 to 300 years.

Katy: Can you imagine though, being like, the person who figured that out, if we just put them in the, in the, you know, in this bog for six days, you know, six months to a

Laura: yeah, not too long, not

Katy: yeah, ta da!

Laura: It was like a fine, a fine process. Yeah, like a, like a boop. Um, so, so they were something, they were out in the [00:08:00] elements for at least a couple hundred years before finally being buried under this house. Um, Truly, that's it. That's all I know because there's, there's nothing else to know.

So the questions are, who were they? There's speculation that clearly these people were someone important.

Katy: Multiple people of

Laura: Multiple important people. Right? Um, and due to similarities in other cultures and things like that, they were like, okay, well, like, maybe this mummification, maybe this was something like, Okay, why being stitched together?

Perhaps, this is a long shot, but this is what it said in the article, not what I'm thinking. It said perhaps it was a way to merge ancestries into one lineage. Okay, so you're like combining all your ancestors into one, and then you would, then, then they could be consulted

Katy: Oh, I see. Yeah, I

Laura: Um,

Katy: See, I go too [00:09:00] sciency down the route of like, maybe they just had three dead bodies, stitching them together to be like, let's see what happens. Like, like, do different people, yeah, yeah, let's do different, that was so, an ADHD person. I wonder what would happen. Three, let's take these three different dead bodies that I have like do different people from different

Laura: Or imagine, like, how much we could mess with people of the future by doing

Katy: Right, right, but also like okay, so do different people of different ethnic backgrounds Decompose differently, you know what I mean? Because they wouldn't know back

Laura: Oh yeah, I know they would know. And I mean, they're all obviously the same peoples. Like, they're um, these,

Katy: but back then But back then though, you know how much it was like one family versus another and like my family's better than your family kind of

Laura: Well, right? Maybe this was a way to, like, overcome some weird family feuds or something. You're like, you know what? We can't make these marriage alliances work, so instead, we'll just stitch you [00:10:00] together once you're dead.

Katy: Right. It's like a marriage quilt but like way weirder Right,

Laura: then, your family has to get along because, like, obviously your ancestors are now intertwined with each other.

Katy: yeah. Oh,

Laura: And then why were they eventually buried under this particular house together? Like, what does that have to do with anything? So, maybe, there's also like, I mean, I found just an article later that referenced Christianity in this island. So, you, you, I wonder like, okay, like, then did finally, like, somebody was like, we should bury these

Katy: should probably bury these people. Yeah. They've been on display for the last few hundred years. It's time that they can go to heaven and just have some peace. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

Laura: So who knows? Who knows? Many, many questions, but so cool. Stitch together human bod I mean, like, talk about an archaeologist's dream.

Katy: [00:11:00] Yeah. I would, I wouldn't even know where to begin to start asking questions about that one. Once I figured out it was different people together, I'd be like, well, don't know. Don't

Laura: would keep me awake for the rest of my life if I was the archaeologist who found it.

Katy: Oh my goodness. Yeah, so bizarre. Well, that was a great one. That was a great one. All righty Well next week then i'm gonna also talk about just a singular one body of one of one person so So until then guys, uh, make sure you go check us out on patreon and support us there It would greatly help us to keep bringing content again Like we said the new season will start in january

Laura: But for the holidays,

Katy: after the holidays Bodies in box. What a light hearted holiday conversation. Bringing people together. Ha

Laura: Yeah, for the holidays. Oh, that one needs to be drawn. Somebody needs to do some fan art of that one.

Katy: Oh, so gross. [00:12:00] Alright guys, talk to you next week.

Laura: Bye.