- [Dan] Warning, what you're about to see
could be disturbing to some viewers.
(suspenseful music)
Imagine this, a chicken
that spends two years walking around without a head.
- Turns out that you don't need a whole brain
to run a chicken.
- Or a 10-year-old taller than Michael Jordan.
- He's gigantic.
He never, ever, ever, ever stops growing.
(dramatic music)
- What about a lake believed to turn animals to stone?
- And they basically become petrified.
It's like they looked at Medusa.
- These are the bodies so surprising,
they are truly unbelievable.
(dramatic music)
- It's 1918 and proud parents, Harold and Addie Wadlow,
welcome a new baby boy to their family, little Robert.
At first, his size is relatively normal,
but what happens when Robert starts growing and never stops?
(suspenseful music) (children chattering)
- So when Robert Wadlow is born in 1918 in Alton, Illinois,
by all appearances, he's perfectly normal.
But very quickly, his parents notice that something is off.
He begins to grow at a phenomenal pace.
When he's eight years old, he's 5 foot 11,
as tall as his father.
- By the time he's 10, he's 6 foot, 6 inches tall.
- [Dan] The Wadlows try to give their boy a typical childhood,
but it's soon clear Robert is anything but.
- The average male height in America at this time
is like, 5'9", and he's not yet done growing.
- Even simple, basic things like going to school
present a huge challenge to him.
- When he goes to have lunch with his friends,
he can't even sit at the dining tables
because he's gonna break them when he sits down,
so he has to eat standing up.
He's gigantic compared
to all the other students in his classes.
He can't even fit in the desks
that the regular students sit in.
They try raising them on blocks.
And eventually, he has to stand in the back of the class
because there's nothing else that can accommodate his height.
Life is a complete challenge for the guy.
- But he joins the basketball team.
He's approximately the same size as Michael Jordan.
Can you imagine showing up in Alton, Illinois
to play basketball and there's this 6 foot 6 guy
on the team and he's a legit fifth grader?
- I'm Robert Wadlow, seven feet tall, 12 years old,
and weigh 240 pounds.
- [Dan] When he reaches middle school,
Robert experiences another growth spurt,
but his is extreme.
- At the age of 13, Robert's 7 foot, 4 inches tall
and he's the world's tallest boy scout,
which of course makes the merit badges real tiny
on his chest, I suppose.
- And when you say someone's too big for their britches,
well, he literally is.
- [James] The shoes, the pants, the shirts, all of it
has to be made from scratch.
- I wear the largest pair of shoes ever made.
- Obviously, Robert Wadlow is not gonna be walking
into a shoe store and asking for a size 37.
It's simply not gonna happen.
- [Dan] But what exactly is making young Robert so big?
- Robert Wadlow has gigantism, which is almost always caused
by the pituitary gland constantly resupplying the body
with growth hormone.
- He never, ever, ever, ever,
through his whole life, stops growing.
- [Dan] By the time he's 22.
Robert reaches an astonishing 8 feet, 11 inches.
That's taller than Andre the Giant by a foot and a half.
- The tallest players ever to play in the NBA
are 7 foot 7,
so he dwarfs the tallest persons ever to play in the NBA.
(car honking)
- [Dan] Now, that might sound like every short person's dream,
but for Robert, it's sometimes a nightmare.
- This world isn't built for Robert.
Imagine nothing fitting.
Everything is just too small for him.
- Wadlow hopes to have a full-blown career
like a lot of people his age in that era,
but it's out of his reach in many ways
because he is so enormous.
- He wants to be a lawyer and he never achieves that.
How many people in that era
would've sought out an almost-nine-foot lawyer?
- When Robert Wadlow would go out in public, people stared.
(camera snapping) But they even went beyond that.
They actually would walk up to him and knock on his legs
because he appeared to be a person on stilts.
- [Dan] His size obviously makes a desk job somewhat challenging.
- Robert Wadlow and his family
had spent pretty much his entire life
desperately avoiding the show business angle.
- [Dan] Then, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
come knocking.
- And money's money.
But Robert has conditions.
Robert is never pictured in much of anything other
than a three piece suit
and he will not be presented as a freak.
He's presented as the tallest human being in the world
and in recorded human history.
- Wadlow gets lots of attention
and he does his best to deal with it gracefully.
In one radio interview, the radio interviewer asks him,
"Does it bother you that people stare at you?"
And he chuckles and he says, "I just overlook them."
(tense music)
- Eventually, Robert grew so tall
that it puts tremendous stress on his body
and particularly on his bones and on his leg muscles.
This causes him to need braces.
- [Dan] Those braces ultimately do more harm than good.
- In 1940, he's invited to walk in a 4th of July parade.
The metal brackets on his legs start to cut into him
and develop bruises and lesions.
- [Dan] The cuts on Robert's legs become infected
and he ends up in the hospital.
- After the parade, he developed sepsis,
high fevers, low blood pressure.
- Robert's temperature rises to 104 degrees.
July 15th, 1940,
the world's largest human being passes away.
- [Dan] Robert is just 22 when he passes,
but the strangeness that marked his life continues in death.
- You can't just have a normal coffin.
Robert needs an extra large coffin
that requires 12 pallbearers
to carry him to his grave site.
- [Dan] Even after his death, the public remain oddly curious.
- So in the sorrow of losing their son,
the family is informed that they really need
to take some precautions about his body being stolen.
- His parents start to hear rumors
that curiosity seekers may want to exhume his corpse
and put it on display.
- [Dan] The rumors are credible enough
that Robert's parents take action.
- They pour thousands of pounds of concrete on top
of his grave so that he can rest in peace.
- [Dan] These days, a life-sized statue near Robert's grave site
causes visitors to do what everyone did when he was alive:
Look up. Way, way up.
Record holders like Robert are indeed more than strange.
Our next story transports us around the world
to uncover a different kind of astonishing body.
- In a remote village 250 miles away from Kathmandu,
a worker is just passing through the village
and sees something moving in the distance
out of the corner of his eye.
It looks like a child,
but this is someone who's walking much too quickly
and much too confidently to be a child.
- This road worker really is struggling to make sense of it.
This is in fact, a 72-year-old man.
- [Dan] Chandra Bahadur Dangi stands a mere 21 inches tall,
or as he jokes, 21 inches short.
- The worker who discovered him decides this is worthy
of going to Guinness.
This gentleman needs a world's record.
- [Dan] Calls are made, emails are sent,
and the Guinness World Records Organization is contacted.
When officials see photos, they have lots of questions,
starting with, who is this guy?
(tense music)
- Chandra is born in 1939, the seventh of eight children.
Some of his siblings are normal size.
Some of his siblings have dwarfism like he does.
The village builds ramps for him and lower shelves
so that he can live a normal life
in this extremely rural village.
- He himself often tells people, jestingly,
"I am taller than the chickens,
but I am shorter than the goats."
- [Dan] Then in 2012,
Chandra's small world gets much larger.
- At this point, to validate his stature
and his position as the tiniest human on record,
Guinness Book of World Records, they invite him to Kathmandu.
- Kathmandu is a bustling metropolis for Chandra compared
to the rural life that he had lived prior.
- For someone who has never
been out of their village before,
this is a massive sea change.
He is suddenly in a big city.
He is seeing things he never before imagined
in a world that really is not set up to accommodate him,
but he seems pretty game about the whole thing.
- The Guinness Book of World Records
measure him multiple times to make sure this is legit.
- He is verified, 21.49 inches.
It's official, Chandra Bahadur Dangi
is the shortest man alive.
- [Dan] And just like that,
Chandra becomes an international celebrity.
- And when he is exposed to the world at large,
he lives this, like, rockstar life.
- Chandra now finds himself flying on jets to places,
he'd never been on a plane before.
He's being limousined around, he's staying in swanky hotels.
- He's going to London, he's going to Mumbai,
he's traveling to Australia.
- Here at the age of 72, Chandra suddenly finds himself
a completely different human being
in a completely different world.
- He gets to meet the current tallest living person
in the world, he also gets to meet the shortest woman
in the world.
- [Dan] Eventually Chandra's new life takes a toll.
- While he's touring, he catches pneumonia.
He's a diminutive individual
and that means that all of his internal organs
are really packed into a tiny space.
- And one could speculate
that Chandra can't bring enough air into and out of his body
and it's a setup for infection.
- [Dan] On September 3rd, 2015, he passes away
at the Lyndon B. Johnson Tropical Medical Center.
(pensive music)
But it comes after packing a lifetime of experience
into his final years.
- And what a beautiful capstone
to finally getting your dues at the end
and going out on a high note.
- Eating as much as you want and still losing weight
sounds great to some of us, but the mysterious case
of one young boy might make you think twice.
(ominous music) (birds chirping)
- Isaac Sprague is a, by all accounts, normal 12-year-old.
In 1853, he goes swimming in a local swimming hole,
but when he comes out, he's not feeling well
and his condition deteriorates very quickly.
He gets feverish, achy, fatigued.
Over time, his parents notice,
not only is he looking quite poorly,
but he's also losing weight.
- He's losing weight so rapidly that it scares his family.
Obviously, they're worried about his wellbeing,
but it also scares people around him.
People kind of withdraw
'cause they don't know if he has something contagious.
- [Dan] Even his doctors are mystified.
- He goes from 80-odd-pound adolescent
to a 43-pound human skeleton.
- But his weight levels off at that number.
He stays 43 pounds.
- When you see photos, they are really shocking.
You almost feel like the photograph is a fake.
- You think, oh, that's really weird Photoshop.
They are actual photographs of him.
- As he gets older, he is able to work a little bit
for his father, who's a shoemaker,
and also for a local grocer.
But he's constantly fatigued by this work
'cause he doesn't have any real muscle mass to speak of.
- His parents support him,
but eventually his parents pass away
and he has to earn a living.
- [Dan] So he asks himself,
is there a way to turn this condition into cash?
- In 1865, he gets an offer from the circus.
It's unclear whether he wants to do it, but he does it
because it's really his only option.
Sprague debuts as The Living Skeleton.
- Isaac Sprague eventually catches the eye of P.T. Barnum
and Barnum gets Sprague to join his company.
He's performing with The Four-Legged Woman,
The Lion-Faced Man.
Zip the "What Is It?", who astounds the crown heads
of Europe when Barnum had him under contract.
- On the one hand,
he is kind of making lemonade out of lemons,
but it's actually kind of a grueling job to have.
- [Dan] Sprague dazzles the crowds, but at a cost.
- Isaac Sprague has neither fat nor muscle.
So for his body to survive, he has
to be constantly consuming caloric intake.
So he deals with that by having a hip flask
of sweetened milk, which gives him fat,
gives him some sugar and keeps him going.
Of course, many sideshow performers had flasks,
but they were filled with alcohol.
- The great part of his story, in my eyes,
is that he does find love.
He meets a young woman
and he falls in love with her and they get married.
They have three children, completely healthy,
but that also means that he has
to keep performing in the sideshow
because he now has to support a family.
- He feels the universe owes him something
because of his problem.
- He believes that a stroke of good luck
is right around the corner.
And so he develops a problem with gambling.
And so all that great money from the circus
doesn't get funneled to his family.
- [Dan] By late 1886, Sprague is too weak to travel
or work, so he comes up with a bizarre plan
to secure desperately needed cash for his family.
- So he approaches Harvard Medical School with an idea.
How about when I die, you can get my body,
but you have to pay my family $1,000?
- [Dan] Just a few weeks later, on January 6th, 1887,
Sprague dies.
It's not clear if Harvard ever claims Sprague's body
or pays his heirs,
but allegedly the guy had another trick up his sleeve.
According to friends, he bet someone that he wouldn't live
to the following Saturday.
In fitting fashion, Isaac Sprague wins
the last bet of his life.
Let's consider another unbelievable tale.
Meet Gary Turner, The Elastic Man.
(pensive music)
- Gary Turner, he's born in 1971
about 150 miles outside of London.
He plays sports, he goes to school,
he eats his breakfast every morning.
He has a normal childhood.
- [Dan] But as Gary gets older, he discovers he can do something
that's anything but normal.
- He can pull the skin from his neck up over his face.
He can pull his arm skin out.
- [Dan] How is it possible that Gary can do this?
- Gary Turner has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
The typical form is diagnosed in one in every 5,000 births.
The more extreme examples range in one in every 40,000.
Gary Turner is the most extreme of the most extreme.
- Gary Turner's an amazing example
of what used to be called The Rubber Skin Man Act.
- So we all have stretchy skin to one degree or another,
but in this case, there is a strange combination of collagen
and elastin in his skin that allows it
to be extremely plastic in nature,
allowing him to stretch it to an incredible degree.
- Gary's a natural performer.
He loves the spotlight and nature gave him this gift.
He's on movies, he does interviews.
- Have a try yourself?
- [Interviewer] (laughs) That's amazing.
- Gary mesmerizes crowds by stretching his abdominal skin
to 6.25 inches.
If you think you can do that, go ahead, try.
- In 1999, he is declared
to have the world's stretchiest skin.
And yes, that is a real category.
- Unlike others who have physical differences,
he doesn't have to worry about being nine feet tall.
He doesn't have to worry about being 21 inches tall.
He can throw on a sweatshirt and be anybody.
- [Dan] And there's an additional upside.
- As a silver lining, he doesn't get wrinkles.
- Take a look at this picture.
At first glance, does it seem in any way strange?
What if I told you that a few years
before this photo was taken,
that iron bar shot straight through this man's head?
(pensive music)
- Phineas Gage is a 25-year-old railroad worker in the town
of Cavendish, Vermont.
- Phineas is a professional, hardworking, brilliant citizen.
- His specialty is explosives
'cause they need to lay down railroad track,
you have to blow up a lot of rock.
And so he's the guy that sets the charge.
- As part of Phineas's job,
he has a 3.5 foot iron bar that he uses
to tamp down the gunpowder.
(metal clinking)
- But it's very, very, very dangerous work
because it's black powder
and black powder can go off, like that.
(suspenseful music) (metal clinking)
- He strikes the rock just so with his rod, creates a spark.
(explosion booming)
(ominous music)
- That tamping iron essentially became a bullet.
- [Edward] It shoots upward
and it goes right into his cheek,
(man screaming)
passes behind his left eye,
and then out the top of his head through the frontal left lobe.
It flies 80 feet away from the explosion.
(iron clanging)
- Everyone is absolutely certain the man is dead.
To the shock of his crew mates, he stands up,
starts walking around, asking what happened.
He doesn't seem particularly alarmed.
Because the tapered end of the bar exits his skull,
he is spared greater brain damage
than he otherwise would've suffered.
- [Dan] Doctors managed to stop the bleeding,
but they wonder, what are the long term consequences?
- Phineas was known as an easygoing,
likable guy before his injury.
The person who returns to the railroad crew
is argumentative, abrasive.
- He's irritable, short-tempered, impulsive,
and he's kind of a jerk to everybody around him.
- He's prone to alcoholism and violence
and we could say definitively, these are two different people.
- Gage becomes kind of a medical curiosity
and people are wondering how on earth he survives
and also what is it that has changed his personality?
And it's really, in some ways, the beginning of neuroscience.
- The way the rod goes through his brain, it pierces an area
of the brain that controls emotional responses.
- The frontal lobes,
frontal lobes are really super important
for behavioral control.
When Phineas severely damages his frontal lobes,
it's like a brake has been taken off
of his behavioral regulator
and it is not uncommon with patients
that have frontal lobe damage that they act impulsively.
They can act aggressively.
- Prior to this, people thought personality
was sort of like an extension of your soul.
It was some sort of ethereal part of you
that, you know, you had to work on all the time as opposed
to something that literally came out of synapses
and cells and things in your brain.
- [Dan] However, temper tantrums
are just one possible side effect of a brain injury.
- One of the consequences of certain types
of head injury is Pseudobulbar affect.
Essentially, that results in inappropriate laughter
or crying without any sort of emotional context.
- [Dan] In Hollywood, we call this Tuesday,
but there's an even more unusual medical condition
brought on by a brain injury, foreign accent syndrome.
- I woke up this morning, I didn't do anything different.
Then all of a sudden I was talking in an Irish accent.
- A victim of brain trauma in Australia recovers,
retains the ability of speech
but starts to speak in an Irish brogue.
- I can't shake it.
- It's a bizarre phenomenon
and just one of the many strange secrets the curious case
of Phineas Gage begins to unlock.
- What I find fascinating about the Phineas Gage case
is that 175 years later,
scientists are still studying his case.
He is that important in the history
of our understanding of the human brain.
- [Dan] What eventually becomes of Phineas Gage?
- Because of the change in character
that transpires in Phineas,
he can no longer get along on crew work
and he actually finds work driving a stagecoach
in South America in the nation of Chile.
- Phineas Gage's skull and tamping iron
are on display in the Countway Library of Medicine
at Harvard University.
The relics serve as a reminder
of how remarkably resilient the human body can be,
but it's nothing compared to the resilience of chickens.
1945, Fruita, Colorado.
Farmer Lloyd Olson is ready for dinner.
The main course, a chicken named Mike.
(suspenseful music)
(chicken clucking)
- So Olson walks out, hatchet in hand.
He performs the act
that he has performed countless times
with many other chickens.
(suspenseful music) (chicken squawking)
- Something's different.
The chicken is still alive,
still walking and acting like a chicken,
but Lloyd is holding his head in his hand.
- [Dan] How is this possible?
The answer has a lot to do with the unique attributes
of the gallus gallus domesticuss,
also known as the common chicken.
- Chickens are descended from the dinosaurs
from a group called the theropods,
which include all of those famous meat eaters
like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex.
- Chickens have over 30 different kinds of vocalizations
that they use to communicate with other chickens.
They can remember up to a hundred different faces,
human or chicken or otherwise.
They actually experience REM sleep
because we can measure their eye movements.
These are pretty smart birds.
- [Dan] Unfortunately, Mike loses every one
of these attributes once Lloyd Olson brings the ax down
on his feathery neck.
(suspenseful music) (ax thumping)
- When farmer Olson heads out
for the traditional ax and stump routine
with Mike the chicken, he ends up conducting what amounts
to a complicated form of brain surgery.
His ax cleaves the skull in such a way
that it leaves the stem of the brain.
If you have that brain stem, the circulatory functions,
the respiratory functions, the motor skills are left intact
and he is left with this living, essentially headless chicken.
Turns out that you don't need a whole brain
to run a chicken.
(chicken clucking)
- Now, he has to feed it very peculiarly.
- So Mike, being headless, has no mouth
and so can't eat in the traditional way.
But after the beheading, there's a little opening
to the esophagus exposed right there.
Lloyd is able to keep Mike the headless chicken alive
by feeding food with an eyedropper through that opening,
- [Dan] Pretty soon, Farmer Olson's chicken
becomes the talk of the town.
- He starts to show it around the neighbors, like,
"Look, I've got a headless chicken."
I would show it off.
- Lloyd Olson realizes pretty quickly
that a headless chicken which is still alive
is an amazing attraction
and he takes that animal on the road.
So Lloyd's doing everything he can with Mike.
He's featured in "Life Magazine" and he plays a World's Fair
and he's going to carnivals and circuses.
They're staying in hotels,
and Lloyd and Mike are living large,
and he's making the equivalent of like, 60,000 bucks a month
off this bird that's headless, but still alive.
At long last though, things do come to an end.
- After 18 months of touring on the road,
Mike unfortunately chokes to death on a kernel of corn.
- [Dan] But Mike's short life makes a lasting impact.
- Fruita, Colorado still does celebrate
their most famous citizen,
Mike the Headless Chicken, with an annual festival,
the catch line for which is,
"Keeping an open mind since 1945."
- Mike's unbelievable tale raises an obvious question.
If a headless chicken can survive, can a headless human?
- In 1905, a French doctor is present at the guillotine.
He's waiting for the guillotine to slice a criminal's head off
and after the head has been decapitated,
the doctor calls out the criminal's name
and apparently the criminal looks at the doctor.
and then looks back,
and the doctor calls out the name again and looks back,
and then the doctor calls out
the criminal's name a third time and there's no response.
So based on that, this French doctor estimates
that the human brain is able to stay conscious and awake
and present for up to 30 seconds after death.
- [Dan] Sometimes, the line between life
and death isn't as clear as we think.
- Not all astonishing bodies are bodies
in the conventional sense.
Consider one mysterious salt lake on the border
of Tanzania and Kenya.
(tense music)
- As soon as you see pictures of Lake Natron,
you know that something strange is happening here.
It seems eerie, dead, and otherworldly.
- It's 13 miles away from a volcano.
The locals call it the Mountain of God
and it spits out carbonatite lava.
And that stuff is pretty extraordinary
because it's calcium, sodium, and carbon dioxide
and that's what makes it so corrosive.
- [Dan] This is currently the only place on Earth
spewing this particularly nasty kind of lava
and much of it makes its way into Lake Natron.
- So water is constantly flowing into the lake,
carrying with it minerals,
and then the water evaporates off the surface
and it leaves behind a high concentration
of sodium carbonates.
These are molecules made of sodium and carbon.
You are very familiar with a certain kind
of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, AKA baking soda.
This makes the lake extremely alkaline.
It has similar pH to straight ammonia.
- Alkaline is the opposite of acidic,
but the effects that it'll have on you
are equally corrosive.
If you were to drink some of that water,
you're gonna feel it immediately on your lips
as it goes down your tongue and into your esophagus,
all along the way, nothing but horror and pain.
Even though most of the animals avoid it,
sometimes animals do get in the lake
and they basically become petrified.
It's like they looked at Medusa.
- Creatures that perish in Lake Natron
don't actually turn to stone.
They become calcified, meaning,
they are encrusted in these mineral salts
in such a way that preserves their bodies.
- There are these pictures of these birds that are dead.
They look like they're still alive,
but alive like a zombie is alive.
(eerie music)
- [Dan] But not everything that touches this strange lake dies.
- Perhaps most marvelous of all,
you have two and a half million lesser flamingos
who don't just live at this lake,
but they actually nest there.
- The flamingos are specially adapted to this environment.
They have thick scales on their legs that allow them
to withstand this highly corrosive environment.
And then, all the salts that they're constantly ingesting,
they have special salt glands near their beaks
that pull salt out of their bloodstream and expel it.
- [Dan] The algae they eat are also peculiar.
- There's a special kind of algae
that thrives in these conditions
and occasionally has seasonal blooms
that turn it a very red color,
which actually provides the pigment
that makes those flamingos pink.
- [Dan] It's astounding that this body of water
produces such visions of beauty and horror.
- Because the lake water is so clear,
you can't really tell where the horizon is,
where the lake stops and the ground begins.
- [Dan] In 2007, a news crew flying over Lake Natron
experiences that firsthand.
- This lake is very, very shallow,
no more than 10 feet deep, and it's incredibly reflective
and so it's hard to tell where the surface is.
And there was an accident.
(suspenseful music)
- The helicopter crashed into the lake.
What happens is, the people have enough time,
they can survive long enough to swim to the shore.
But the helicopter, it's made of metals
and this thing immediately begins to corrode.
- [Dan] Despite its lethal waters,
Lake Natron is a paradise
compared to our next bizarre body.
Anyone who says, "Beam me up, Scotty,"
to this place probably shouldn't.
(tense music)
- Planet HD 189733B is 63 light years away,
which in the cosmic scheme of things, is relatively close.
- Now, this celestial body, it is amazing.
We're talking about a planet
that is even bigger than our Jupiter in our solar system.
- It does look to be blue and we kind of have this idea
that you know, we are the pale blue dot.
So another pale blue dot
is therefore going to be the best place for us to go.
- No, this is a hell world.
- It's a little hot and a little windy.
The temperature is 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit
at the surface and the winds blow at 5,400 miles per hour.
- If you were to go to this planet, you would boil and burn
and then the wind would whip you around like a leaf on fire.
Then there's the rain.
It is actually silicate particles that are so hot,
it's kind of like raining molten glass.
- So if you could imagine being sand blasted, right,
you would be reduced to a skeleton in minutes,
if not seconds, on this planet.
- [Dan] With conditions like this,
it's doubtful we'll be visiting HD189733B anytime soon.
- If you're asking me
where to find the most astonishing bodies,
I'm looking to the sky
and I'm looking out into the universe.
This planet is not what I would call hospitable,
but I want to know if there are any other astonishing worlds
that we are gonna find in our galaxy of 400 billion stars.
- We've all heard the phrase, "Two heads are better than one,"
but what about 2,000?
(tense music)
- The ancient city of Abydos
is one of the most significant locations
of all ancient Egypt.
The first things we find in Abydos dates back to 3,500 BC,
that's over 5,500 years ago.
- It's a massive, sprawling temple compound.
It is used in part for burial,
including of first dynasty rulers,
but there's all kinds of symbology
that run through the complex
that we modern Westerners do not understand.
- [Dan] Much of the site remains a mystery
until an unbelievable discovery is made in 2023
by a team from New York University.
- So this team is digging, gingerly brushing away at sand,
and they find these pieces
of what ends up becoming the skull of a ram.
- [Dan] Curiously, the ram skull has been mummified
and deliberately placed here for burial.
- This is very, very promising, so they keep going,
thinking, like, we could find an intact ram.
- This team from NYU comes across not one, not two,
not 5, not 10, not 20.
- They find 2,000 ram heads,
all specifically stacked next to each other.
- These are not just skulls straight out
of the butcher shop.
These are treated like sacred objects.
- This is not a cumulative scenario.
All of these skulls got put there at the same time.
- [Dan] But why would anyone mummify 2,000 rams?
- Ramses II, or Ramses the Great,
is the pharaoh that's alive
when the Abydos temple complex is completed.
However, we also know that these rams were placed
into the skull room 2,000 years ago,
which is 1,000 years after Ramses II died.
The theory is that he's still being worshiped
one millennium after he passes.
- Another question raises itself.
What happened to the rest of the bull?
It's only mummified heads of the rams, not the whole body,
which is significant
because we have mummified animals in Ancient Egypt
and the whole body is mummified, not just the skull.
It's very likely that that was done on purpose.
- [Dan] That part is still a mystery
and certainly not the first we encounter in Egypt.
Over 150 years ago, an even stranger collection of bodies,
whole ones, is unearthed
by French archeologist Auguste Mariette.
(tense music)
- In 1851, there is a pretty interesting discovery
that you could say is somewhat similar.
Auguste Mariette has a huge team out at Saqqara.
- And he is searching for a place
that local Bedouin lore says is a burial ground
that's a bit weird.
- It is about 10 miles to the south
of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
I have to also mention, before Mariette's discovery,
the Bedouins of Egypt name this "The Monsters' Cage,"
the place that keeps monsters in.
- Local Bedouin tribes tell the team
of excavators something unique exists in this area.
- They come upon a thing that is startling.
- He finds this boulevard of stairs.
- He takes his torch, he enters,
and as he walks through, he finds one room
after the other of massive sarcophagi.
- There's 24 and they're giant.
12 feet, by 6 feet, by 6 feet, 40,000 pound lids.
Why are these coffins so massive?
What are they containing
and what are they trying to keep contained?
- And you have to understand,
Mariette now thinks he's walking into the cage for monsters.
The Bedouins are very upset
because they think Mariette is bringing those monsters out.
- [Dan] Mariette and his team manage
to remove one of these giant lids and peer inside.
- They find a full mummy of an Apis bull.
We're talking a 1,300 pound bull, massive animal.
- Bulls are extremely important to the ancient Egyptians.
They are understood as mediators between the individual
and the gods, in the same way some Westerners today
understand saints as mediators to the holy.
- [Dan] These Apis bulls are sacrificed starting
about 3,000 BCE.
It's part of an elaborate religious ritual that
takes place at key astrological times across centuries.
- Each of these sarcophagi has a inscription on the side
that specifically reads, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,
"This is where the Apis bull stays,"
hence the Bedouins calling it The Monsters' Cage.
- [Dan] To Mariette's surprise,
not all the bulls are left to rest in peace.
- Mariette finds one sarcophagus that is broken through.
It's unclear, is it the monster that broke out
or someone broke in to steal what's inside the sarcophagus?
It is another mystery.
So you dug yourself into another mystery
while trying to solve your first one.
That's the life of an archeologist.
- Whether human, animal, or literally out of this world,
these tales of astonishing bodies
leave us asking one simple question, what else is out there
that could be even more unbelievable?