The bodies buried in the bog

0:00Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system. But I also want something that's easy. It just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible. And my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment. Louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

0:36Hey, I've got the campaign brief ready. Built from last quarter's data and the competitive landscape. Approved? Oh, agents, where would we be without you? Somewhere with a lot more tabs open. Create your first Monday agent in minutes at monday.com. The word bog has never had a particularly charming connotation to me. It brings to mind a wetland with a lot of decaying plants and, like, poor water drainage. But a few years ago, my former colleague, Anna North, I kind of obsessed with bogs. She is a journalist who covers a range of topics, but she also writes novels. And she wound up getting so stuck on bogs that she wrote an entire book with a bog as like a central character.

1:27This book called Bog Queen. And talking to her, I started to realize why bogs were so compelling. They're kind of like time capsules, almost, full of scientific questions about both our past and our future, in a way. So I asked Anna to come on the show and talk to us a bit about what's lurking in the bogs.

2:11Anna North:Hi, Anna. Thank you for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Maybe let's just start with the simple, what is a bog exactly? How does it differ from other wet places? Yes, there are many different wet environments and they all have different names. And I have a little definition of bog that I like to use. A bog is a type of wetland made of peat. And peat is organic material that builds up faster than it decays. Builds up faster than it decays. So normally stuff just turns into dirt. Peat, for whatever reason, stays as plants and builds up in layers. And that becomes bog. That's right. So in the case of a lot of bogs in Northern Europe and also in the far north of North America, that stuff, that organic material is sphagnum moss.

3:05And sphagnum moss is really amazing at holding onto a bunch of water. So it makes this really wet, squishy environment, preserves itself, and none of it ever really decomposes. So if you imagine just like throwing an apple on the floor, right, like eventually it's going to rot. But peat behaves a little differently. In the case of, say, the bogs in northern Europe, which are made of this type of moss, the moss gets so wet that it drives out most of the air. So it creates this environment that's mostly anaerobic, meaning there's no oxygen. And when there's very little oxygen, it's really hard for things to break down and decay.

3:46So instead of rotting, you kind of just get the old layers of moss pressed down under the new ones and pressed down and pressed down and pressed down until you have these huge stacks of moss. Sometimes it'll form big hills of moss. They're like peat mounds. Other times it's just sort of, it's like a mat that's kind of underground, very spongy, kind of gooey, and very, very preservative of anything that happens to fall into it or be thrown there. Have you seen one of these like stacks of peat in person? So as part of my research for my book, Bog Queen, I was actually able to go to a bog called Lindo Moss.

4:26And there I met an environmental group called Transition Wilmslow. and folks from that group really they did take me under their bog wings um and they showed me all around the area and they showed me what sphagnum moss what it's supposed to look like when it's like bright green and forming these like kind of like mats made of interlocking stars i in addition to seeing the moss itself i also saw areas where it has sort of been dug out and you could see like there was an area with layers of peat that was taller than me and you could even see like the

5:00Anna North:old peat and like the newer fresher peat at the top it's wild to see so it does this anaerobic preservation thing that you were describing where basically like the lack of oxygen means that all the things that fall into it are preserved what kind of stuff is preserved in there um so i got into bogs through bog bodies bog bodies yeah so when you say bog bodies people are either immediately really excited or they're like, what are you talking about? So for those of you who are like, what are you talking about? Sort of starting thousands of years ago and moving all the way up to occasionally the Middle Ages, people would sometimes bury human bodies in bogs.

5:47This was something that happened throughout Northern Europe. We are still not sure why, but the fascinating thing is that because of the properties of these bogs, the bodies were wonderfully preserved. So every now and then in the modern era, we'll dig up a human body, and it looks like it might have died yesterday. Wow.

6:11Anna North:Is there like an example that you found particularly compelling of a bog body or like one that drew you in? So there's a bog body in the British Museum. I've seen him a few times. His name is Lindoman. We don't know what his real name was, sadly. I wish we could know. that's not something that's preserved. They call him Lindoman because he was found in a bog called Lindomoss. It's incredibly beautiful and strange to visit him. You walk into this room and then you're basically face to face with this human body. He's kind of smushed a little bit like a human bag. I know, I know, I know. But it's still like what's amazing is that because he was buried in this bog.

6:56Like he, this is going to sound so horrible, you guys, but his flesh is still there. It's not, he's not a skeleton, even though he's thousands of years old. So you really are in the presence of like this man's body, a human person. And even though it is disturbing in some ways, to me, seeing him was really beautiful because it was so clear that I'm just like with another a human being, even though he's dead and he walked the earth thousands of years ago. Has anyone ever been found and mistaken for a recent body? Yes. So that's happened multiple times. And the reason that I decided to really dig into this even more and ultimately write a novel about it is that I learned the story of Lindo Woman.

7:45So Lindo Woman was found in the same bog as Lindo Mann, Lindo Moss. And when some people first found her, just these young men, they found her and brought her to the police. And soon a local man came forward and he's like, okay, you got me. I murdered my wife 20 years ago. I threw her in the bog. I thought no one would find out, but obviously you found out. So I confess it's over. The police took a statement. It was obviously a very shocking thing for the local community. But there are some irregularities in the remains, and so they send them to a university for further testing. The university calls back and is like, look, I don't know where this guy's wife is, but this woman is 2 ,000 years old.

8:34I know. So I think this case of mistaken identity just really stuck with me. And the reason, part of the reason that her identity could be mistaken in this way is because of the enormous, just really astounding preservative properties of the bog. And then I got into so many, so many other examples where people's faces have been preserved, their clothing, the contents of their stomachs. And there's also one of my favorite things that's been found in bogs is butter. Butter, like a lump of butter? sometimes in a barrel, sometimes like on its own. People dig this up kind of frequently, especially in Ireland.

9:17They call it bog butter. Can you eat it? You can. You shouldn't. People have. They have eaten bog butter. What does it taste like? Cheese, reportedly. I have not done this.

9:32Anna North:Okay. So they really are, they're like time capsules. Yeah. It sounds like. Is that sort of what you wanted to write about for your book or what, yeah, what was it that really made you feel like, okay, I'm going to write a whole book about this? Yeah, I kind of wanted to write a murder mystery. I like to play with different genres in my fiction. And I realized I'd never tried to do a mystery. I liked this idea of a mystery where the victim is a bog body, where the victim is like 2000 years old, and where ultimately, like, you're probably not going to be able to fully solve the mystery, right? Like, you're not even going to be able to know the victim's name.

10:16There's so much that you'll never be able to find out. But there is also so much that you will be able to find out. It's, like, tantalizing. So I think it was all of that. And then the bog environment itself sort of emerged, like, as I did research, as something that was, like, increasingly important to the story. And so I knew that the bog would always be, like, very central and important to the story. But it took a while to figure out exactly how. Interesting. I'm stuck on this idea of tantalizing information.

10:49Anna North:I guess what can we learn beyond just sort of like the, oh, this is an exciting murder mystery type thing? What can we learn from a time capsule like this, from finding bodies or butter or whatever else? Yeah, I mean, I think what's really amazing about these environments is that they just preserve different kinds of things than other environments. So, you know, obviously we can learn a ton from someone's skeleton. And bones and human remains have been found all around the world in all different kinds of places. Fossils have been found. But in a bog, what is preserved are things like hair or skin or clothing, leather, wool.

11:34And that gives us access to just this whole other realm of information that you just can't get anywhere else. After the break, a whole realm of information that you can't get anywhere else.

11:53Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music. All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room, but you gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't wanna take the speaker with you, but you also don't wanna miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple speakers to try out, so I've got a move to here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall,

12:25I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

12:41And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app or if I'm using AirPlay. so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp, they've got great bass, and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So, I don't know, if I want to head outside for a minute. It's super easy. And yeah, pretty nice out. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

13:32Support for the show comes from Square, the business platform that aims to help sellers become neighborhood favorites. These days, buying stuff is pretty easy with Tap to Pay. Maybe it's a breakfast sandwich at the corner cafe, a lunch break haircut, or some wall art that you picked up spontaneously on your way home. Square says every day we interact with businesses that rely on Square to make those transactions so fast and so simple. Square brings payments, point of sales, inventory, staffing, and online sales together in one easy-to-use system. Their hardware is sleek, simple, it comes with software that's intuitive to use in your day-to-day operations, and it also has AI-powered tools that help automate routine tasks, giving you more time back as a seller.

14:21Whether you are just starting out or growing from one location to many, Square can help you out. You can sell online, in-store, or both, and customize your setup as your business evolves. Right now, listeners can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash unexplainable. That is Square, S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash unexplainable. Get started with Square and build a setup that works the way you do.

14:56This is advertiser content from IBM. Cold take. When it comes to quantum computing, if you need a million qubits to calculate anything, it sounds like you need a quantum computer the size of a football field. So why are we even trying? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the Global Lead for Content and Education at IBM Quantum. So you will not need a quantum computer the size of a football field. The quantum chip is really, you know, the size of a stamp. So the chip itself is never going to be the size of a football field. What could be a very large footprint is all of the infrastructure that goes around cooling it, housing the chip, and controlling it.

15:43IBM has really been, I think, the biggest pioneer in terms of making this technology accessible. IBM has deployed, at this point, over 90 quantum computers worldwide. So if we talk about scaling, I will just say we have a plan. And we have what it takes, engineering and science-wise, to make these computers work and to build them up to the scale that we know they will be useful. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at IBM.com slash quantum.

16:22How can you be sure unless you have another piece? Sit down, fog.

16:29Anna North:What is like your favorite example? One of my favorites is this woman called Haldermo's woman who was found in Denmark. And she was actually found wearing beautiful clothing. And scientists have been able to do an incredible amount of analysis on those garments, like studying the fibers from which they're made, using the special isotope analysis to determine where those fibers came from. They found out that the fibers in this woman's clothes came from two different places quite far away. And also that the woman did not come from the place where she was buried. Wait, what about her clothes made them say, oh, they're not from here?

17:12Anna North:Was it like the pattern wasn't correct? No, it's even cooler than that. So they did reconstruct the pattern. If you look at her clothes, they're kind of brown now because, like, it's been a minute. They've been in the mud. They're sort of mud colored. But they were able to find out what the original colors were, and they're actually quite vibrant and patterned. So that is all cool. But no, they actually studied the fibers. So like some of her clothing was made of wool. And you can study the radioactive isotopes that are laid down in wool when the sheep eat grass from the ground. And then you can test the soil.

17:46And so you can be like, this wool comes from sheep that grazed in Denmark. and that's what they did. Wow. They know, I think, that she traded because some of the wool is from different places and they also can know that she traveled. So then a question that we have about her becomes, was it common for a woman of Iron Age Denmark or Iron Age Scandinavia to travel around to different places and wear clothing that was made in several different places? Or is this like an important dignitary who, you know, traveled around her world to, like, visit her many castles or, you know, whatever. We don't know if she was important in her time or not.

18:30And we don't know why she was put in the bog, because not every Iron Age person was buried in that way. There are other methods of burial. So we think that the bog bodies were special in some way. We just don't know how. For some reason, I thought, my impression was that they, it was like a criminal sentence. A really common belief for a long time was that the bog bodies were criminals. A lot of them have signs of violence on their bodies. We're not always sure that the violence is pre-mortem. What if it happened in the bog? and there have been these really interesting new hypotheses more recently about why people were chosen for a bog burial.

19:12In particular, there's like a striking number of bog bodies who have visible disabilities that show that they might have needed care during their lives. And so some people actually speculate that these are people who were perceived as really special and deserving of special care during life and then also during death. These people might even have been seen as sacred or holy. It's this really interesting alternate interpretation that I really like.

19:39Anna North:And the more you describe, it's like it's mysteries on mysteries on mysteries on mysteries. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is that, you know, I'm just a layperson, but I sort of feel like it could be possible that one day we'll find out exactly what killed each of these bodies, right? Like the actual cause of death. That's sort of, that's what the main character is working on in the book is trying to find a cause of death for this body. And then it feels within reach to me. But like there's other things about their lives that we're never going to know. Like, well, if they, this is one, this is how they died, but why did they die that way?

20:10If they were executed, why? What was the, what was the crime? What was the law? If they were seen as special, what was the belief system behind that? But even just what was their name, we're never going to know their names. And something about that is really, like, heartbreaking but also fascinating to me. Yeah, because obviously their names are not Holdramo's. Right. No, yeah. I mean, some of their names, like, the names that we call them are sort of beautiful. There's a girl that they call the Raspberry Girl because raspberries were found in her stomach. I know. But she had a name, too. And since her people probably didn't have writing, we're never going to know what that was.

20:51I guess any remains in a museum, there's always sort of a question about would someone who was buried in the bog, for whatever reason, want to be disinterred and have their stomach examined or be put on display. And, I don't know, something about the raspberry girl really brought that home to me. Yeah, it's an interesting question. There definitely have been protests around the display of the bog bodies in museums. So there's people who feel that Lindow Man, for example, should not be on display and that he should be returned to the bog where his people buried him, which I think is a really valid view.

21:33I think seeing human remains in a museum is really complicated. To me, I feel a difference when I see Lindow Man in the British Museum in London, not that far from his home, versus if I were to see remains, for example, that were found in Egypt and potentially stolen and, you know, taken by a colonialist culture to a totally different place and displayed in a completely different context. You know, I've seen Linda Man a few times now, and I don't get that same kind of ick that I might feel when there's all these other issues at play. But you are still looking at a person, and I think it's valid to say, to ask whether we should do that.

22:18Are there other questions we can ask from the bog sort of unrelated to history or human remains? Yeah, so like a big like sort of other thread that really pulled me into the bog, sorry, everyone, is they have this enormous like climate importance. The thing about things not breaking down is that means they're not releasing their carbon up into the atmosphere. So all the carbon from all the moss that goes in there over centuries and centuries and millennia is just staying there all packed in. So it's actually this incredible sort of bulwark against climate change, even more efficient than forests.

23:01Anna North:For some reason, in my mind, bogs are mostly in the UK. Are they actually all over? There's peatlands all around the world. So I think for Americans, we often think of bogs as being sort of an English or Irish phenomenon. I think some of that might be about the poet Seamus Haney, who wrote these famous bog poems that people studied in school. But there are peatlands in northern Canada. There are peatlands in Africa in the Congo Basin. There are peatlands in Southeast Asia. There are peatlands in Panama. Really all over the place. Are we doing a good job of sort of supporting them as carbon sinks, I guess?

23:45Anna North:Bert, do you think we are doing a good job of supporting them? Everything I know suggests that we may not be doing a good job supporting them as carbon sinks. But I'm curious, I guess, how bad of a job we are doing supporting them as carbon sinks. So, I mean, I think the interesting thing about this is that I think bogs suffer from not being charismatic in the way that rainforests are. Or I think they're charismatic. But I think they have like a bit of a PR problem where it's sort of very visible and legible to people why you should save the rainforest. And I think the bog environment is sort of, you know, is like overlaid with ideas of like fear and falling in.

24:28It's not, I think, not often portrayed in pop culture as like a place of great beauty or a place you need to save. So they haven't been, you know, there's not as much fundraising around them. That's starting to change. Like bogs are really, I think, having a moment. Annie Proulx wrote a book about wetlands that I think has helped raise their profile. So there's a lot going on in the bog world, but I think it's still kind of like this unsung climate hero. And so there's a lot of bad stuff going on. A lot of bogs have been places where peat has been harvested. So either for fuel, you can burn it, or for potting soil, just for use in gardening.

25:07And so Lindo Moss, the bog in England where Lindo Man and Lindo Woman were found, had been really kind of cut up and degraded by industrial equipment over the course of many decades. At that time when I went, which was in 2021, a lot of it had been basically destroyed, and a lot of that original peat was gone. In some places, peatlands have been cleared for oil palm. as peatlands dry out then they do release some of their carbon into the atmosphere they're also vulnerable to fires which is really bad because then tons of carbon goes up into the atmosphere really quickly and then also those fires can be really dangerous because there's so much fuel down there and they can smolder for a long time so there's a lot of threats to peat and bog ecosystems that people all around the world have to worry about i have also had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people who are working on conservation in peat environments, and that has been really cool to see, including, you know, people who have been sort of stewarding these areas for generations.