This is the sole channel on the internet I would click "cocaine mummies" and think the content I was getting served would be factual. Please keep up the good work!
Not allowing another look by someone else at the Mummies in question is a deal breaker for me. Repeatability is a foundation of science. Even in my own humble experience, when I worked in Q.A., if any of us got an unusual result the first thing we'd do is ask someone else if they were seeing the same thing, getting the same measurements. Evidence others aren't allowed to verify isn't evidence.
One possible reason is they may know the mummies are fake and are embarrassed that the original buyer (that German king, I think) was duped by the English man.
Literally the only logical explanation is the mummy ingested both cocaine and nicotine shortly after the tomb was breached and the curse activated. Definitely scary for the archeologists to deal with a coked-out mummy.
He the mummy would certainly have a lot to say. Like when you get the quiet person to talk and now you have to hear every thought that they didn't tell others.
Meth would have been a more believable culprit for the missing nose. If they find that then I'm sure it was a contamination. That begs the question ...... did they test for opioids? Or just THC/Nicotine/Coke? The test graphs are remarkably thin and short.
The cocaine may have come from the cocaine-fortified wine Vin Mariani, which was advertised in 1899 with the tagline: "Les Momies elles-mêmes se Dressent et marchant quand elles ont bu du Vin Mariani." "The Mummies themselves Rise and walk when they have drunk Vin Mariani." Some idiot aristocrat probably tried it at a party, mostly on one mummy but getting some on the others.
I honestly think this is a more colorful story than the ancient egyptians somehow having contact with the Americas for the sole reason of getting coca leaves.
My first thought at the beginning of this video was: "Maybe there exists some Old World plants that contain cocaine or some other substance that reacts like cocaine in the tests," Then, much later in the video I started to think the contamination hypothesis sounded even better. What we need is more data, accurate data not denied by some museum curator's need to keep this mystery up.
I bet some grad students were hanging out in the same room as the mummies, smoking cigarettes, having drinks, doing some lines, then one of them sneezed and the coke went everywhere then they went "Oh shit, we gotta get out of here!"
I mean the archeologist who claimed this theory has a name from the same country whose entire sports team always tests positive for doping... who quickly change nationality to German to avoid getting their "grandpa's heart medicine" get to "accidentally contaminate" everything around them.
I really love your videos. Great explanation with no snarky or mean condescending. I really wish Joe Rogan and other big platforms would have you on to cut through the blather about ancient history
Nicotine pesticides are still used today. It's especially easy to make at home (tobacco + water). Being used on mummies in the 1800's to get rid of bugs makes a lot of sense...not to forget all the snuff being used at that time too which was easily dispersed in the air and probably settled on everything. Have they run these tests on any recently found mummies? Seems like that would be an important thing to push for. Great video!
The treatment of tobacco with lye as described in the video would produce the free nicotine alkaloid, not the salt often used in insecticides. This free alkaloid is much more soluble in lipids and resins, non-polar substances. It would, therefore, travel very easily into the tissues of the mummy.
Yeh but they tested bone teeth soft tissue ...you can see it in the journal text and tables ...so not just testing the skin surface That would be bad science
Aweseome as always, BUT he made a logical fumble a 13:12. He asks "wouldnt the Egyptians start growing coca plants in Egypt?". We MODERNS (both law abiding and criminals) have been striving to get coca plants to grow outside of the Andes for centuries and failed. Its a picayune plant that just wont grow in places not the Andes and it tropical but high altitude climate, or something.. The low altitude flat land of Egypt has little resemblence to the plants homeland so you wouldnt expect coca to grow there ( and I am sure SOME modern folks have tried to grow it Egypt just like theyve tried everwhere else).
I remember this. My first thought was that when ancient Egypt had any sort of contact with another nation, however casual, they tended to write about it in terms like "Behold, the kings of faraway lands submit to my rule and grovel at my feet, and agree that Egypt rules, others drool!" But they're not even going to mention the farthest-away land they "conquered"? They're not going to trumpet their accomplishment in sailing farther than any other nation dreamed possible and being the conquerors of a whole other continent?
@@SalTarvitz Not as far as I know. Sure you're not thinking of tin? The Phoenicians might've bought British tin, but as far as I know there's no evidence for Egyptian traders reaching that far; they really weren't interested in that part of the world nor would they have had much of a sense of northwestern Europe. Besides, they would've had much closer sources of copper than Britain and Afghanistan, such as the Sinai.
@@valmarsiglia Most Tin in Bronze age Europe came from Western Europe. Egypt also got their Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan. Though these usually came from middle men.
@@something1600 yup, there's no bronze age without globalization, so any guys who claim about going back to "good old times" before race mixing and foreign trade, would need to retvrn to literally stone age. As you can't get an industrial supply of bronze without mingling with foreigners.
I have no idea what mumies are discused here, but in the 1800's, cocaine was freely available in europe over the counter, as was tobaco and canabis, it is certain that contamination before the tests were done could acout for these findings, how long were the mumies left open to view by people taking such drugs, perhaps even taking drugs in the presense of the mumies over time that could acount for the findings.
Yes there is no reason that the mummies did not get in contact with the drugs that were freely available in the 19th century and in some countries even later.
This reminds me of the kumara debacle: people think there was contact with the Americas, and the people only brought back one plant? Can you imagine if the old world had access to corn!?
I literally cannot imagine food without potatoes, tomatoes, and bell pepper. This is like THE staple in Eastern Europe. WTF were our ancestors eating before trade with Americas, just beetroot?
@KasumiRINA Bell peppers? They taste like herbal and slightly bitter water with a crunch, I don't know how you get excited about that...at least jalapeños taste like something. But yeah, potatoes and tomatoes are nice.
I remember watching that documentary when it came out. The whole time I watched it, I kept thinking of the photos in the early 19th century of mummies displayed outside sold to collectors and the amount of contamination must have been present.
Cocaine was isolated in 1855. And shortly after people started using it a lot. At first most commonly in expensive wines, but it wouldn't be long before it's being sold as just cocaine. And those 19th century pictures of mummies you saw were likely privately owned mummies. And who owns mummies and does a lot of cocaine? Rich people of course. I always thought 19th century contamination was a likely reason too.
I saw that documentary as well, or at least one documentary about this. Cool this channel adresses this mystery because it remained an unexplanable fact in my mind for decades. But in my memory, there were similar tests done on European mummies and ancient corpses found almost intact in bogs, and they had nicotine and cocaine on them too, according to the scientists in the documentary. Strange World of Antiquity isnt adressing these researches. Not only had they nicotine found in the hair, but I remember they said that the leels of nicotine were so high, that if that ancient person had consumed it, he or she would have died of nicotine overdose, so high the levels were. Maybe ground for another ideo about this mystery?
I chewed coca leaves when I was in Peru and drank coca tea. It really helps with stomach ailments and altitude sickness. We used the leaves in a despacho prayer ceremony as well and burned them to carry the prayers to the heavens. The leaves are precious to many people there and are almost another form of currency.
What would you say the effects of ingesting the leaves is compared to powder? Asking for a friend. Also if you've never done powder or don't want to say, I totally understand. I used to be an addict myself many years ago, but I've always been curious what it's natural form is like.
@@talkingmudcrab718 it’s like the difference between drinking a cup of coffee, and sniffing pure caffeine. You don’t get much of a rush, and really don’t feel anything at all. But drink or chew a lot, and you won’t fall asleep all night. Once I went to the cemetery to visit my Peruvian wife’s grandmas grave. A lot of family arrived, with a big bag of leaves and a case of beer. After chewing and drinking for a couple hours we went down to a real sketchy area to catch a bus. I remember feeling invincible, and actually hoping someone would try something. I’m normally pretty peaceful, but that day I was ready to go!
I went on a hike to a peak on the Altiplano n on the way back got super swimmy and had some coca leaf tea and i dunno if it made me more or less high than being literally high on the altitude cuz i was pretty toasty
What a video, super well researched, produced and presented. I have in fact wondered about this topic for so many years now, and this answered a lot of my burning questions. Thank you so much!
I remember seeing a documentary about an autopsy of a baby mammoth found in Russia. If someone treated a mummy as cavalierly as they treated that baby mammoth, I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover it was contaminated
Thanks! Oops! It showed up! Thanks for the super video. I have a little too much month at the end of my money to do a whole lot, but I am glad I was able to place it on this video because I really liked the way you did it. I do like the fact that you give so many ways for us all to fact check you as well with the references you have provided. Great work David!
This is my first time viewing your content. I have to say, you appear to have more of a preference for figuring out the truth over what you think you know is right. It's a refreshing take as opposed to hearing straight up ignorant, misinformed, disproven, condescending, and ultimately laughable statements and views from "highly educated and intelligent" self-appointed deities. Keep it up. I love it.
I have subscribed, and hit the notification bell! You not only woke me up about " ancient lost, advanced civilizations," but woke me up to the beauty and majesty of the real past. Many thanks. Oh, quite a few musicians in the comments want to form a band called ' Cocaine Mummies.' Are you up for being a manager? 😊 I was hair strand tested once. Proved positive for cocaine. Never took any. 🤔
Brilliant and well done. Thank you for this video. Been scratching my head for years about this. The cocaine issue collapsed entirely because they refuse to allow examination to validate the mummy that had a "genuine" positive result, for reasons that would have also prevented the initial examination...hmmm...I can almost hear them in the background mumbling "of course our mummies are real .. honest, trust us ...and no peeking." And I did not know about the tobacco insecticide washes. Explains it, no question. You went deep on this one, well done. Most excellent, keep pushing this video, please. As I started with, it's brilliant.
Sure, test 'repeatability' is key, though hair traces are also a pretty reliable indicator, and the lack of cocaine evidence in others wouldn't be so surprising, since even if it was somehow 'imported' from the Americas, such a commodity would almost certainly be the utmost rarity that only a few royals could even afford.
Great video David and thank you! I love the method of investigation and obviously the honest work and research you put into your work. I am learning alot from your channel especially on how to research a topic and delve into history. I love ancient history and from my experience some of us can be easily misled by fringe theories and some total nonsense, like Brian Forrester for example. Great head to head with Uncharted X by the way. Your travel series guide is very enjoyable too. Thank you David is what I'm trying to say.
Great video. That was so informative and a master class in how to apply critical thinking skills to anomalous results. I would be fascinated and excited if there were credible evidence of contact between the Americas and Africa/Eurasia before the 15th century (as ther is for the Vikings in North America) but these test results aren’t enough to jump to that interpretation. Keep these results in mind in case further evidence crops up but they’re too ambiguous without other findings.
To tell you the truth....🧐 I'm not here for the mummies....😉 I will sit quietly and learn☺️ I enjoyed your trip to Egypt 😊😊 If i had the budget i would go my self 😞 Its swimming distance away from Greece 😂😂... and still is bit expensive . Im very glad for you 😊😊 Thank you for the video you brought us from Egypt,😘😘😘 I know its very time consuming and fun spoiling to record the trip. That's why we love you 😘 P s The debunkings as well 🤣🤣 Please make more 🤗🤗
It seems a bit strange that the mummified bodies in Germany are not allowed to be seen, given that the (old) Egyptian Museum had a room (which you could enter for the price of an additional ticket) specifically for people to view the mummified pharaohs. I'm presuming the new museum will have the same. Rosalie David is an extremely well-respected Egyptologist and served as director of the International Mummy Database, so why were they not more accommodating? 🤔
It is pretty suspicious and reminds me of some other controversial issues, such as that involving a certain dictator's skull whose name I can't mention on UA-cam.
Love your hacker sensibilities of releasing a booklet for free. It both puts you in a good light and makes knowledge of/interest in history more attainable! Do good things for others and you will be rewarded!
You always gotta remind people that 1 or 2 test results done by the same person is the scientific equivalent of "i heard from my ma, who heard from her cousin that..."
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on this, but I thought I had read that a big reason the Egyptians didn't expand their borders the way other major civilizations did was that they believed either that you had to die in Egypt, or maybe your body had to be enshrined in Egypt, to make it to the afterlife. I can't remember which of those two it was. I would think the same concerns would prevent them from sailing across the Atlantic.
Both Egypt and China had a philosophy which placed themselves at the centre of the world: the pinnacle and the most civilised. They just didn't think there was anything worth having nearby: surrounded by deserts and mountains. The reason they didn't sail out into the Atlantic is the same reason you wouldn't do that: you would die. No one believed there was land beyond the old world until they bumped into it by accident.
@@PlatinumAltaria yes...no reason to leave the fertile lands Although the Vikings did ...because their population increased beyond the lands carrying capacity ...limited land around the fjords
@@oftin_wong No, they left because southern kingdoms would offer money for them as mercenaries, or else they could just steal from those kingdoms. It wasn't about land.
@@PlatinumAltaria it was about land ..they became known as mercenaries like any good fighters but that came later ..they wanted land in England and France and they got it .. The actually land area around the fjords is very limited because of the steep inclines and mountains directly adjacent which reduces the amount of arable farmland to a static amount ...the land was fertile ...very much so, but extremely limited ...same reason they colonised Iceland and Greenland ... briefly during a particularly warm phase but then later abandoned it
I still keep an open mind of the possibility of trans Atlantic voyages. As you say, no chilies or tomatoes before Columbus indicates it was very rare if at all. Certainly it wasn’t a trade route. However the Vikings did it, and it left almost no evidence. I do feel the contamination hypothesis is very strong. So at this point, I’d say it’s possible, but there is a lack of convincing evidence.
I will be teaching my college level course on forensic drug analysis starting in April. This video is very timely. Will show it when we cover cocaine analysis. BTW, benzoyl econine and nicotine have very different chemical structures. Thus it is highly unlikely nicotine could be connverted into BE by some embalming process.
Tropanes are more similar to ecgonine and benzoic acid is a component of some gum resins. However, I feel it more likely the cocaine came from Vin Mariani, which was advertised in 1899 with the tagline: "Les Momies elles-mêmes se Dressent et marchant quand elles ont bu du Vin Mariani." "The Mummies themselves Rise and walk when they have drunk Vin Mariani." Some idiot aristocrat probably tried it at a party, mostly on one mummy but getting some on the others.
Maybe you can answer a question given your expertise. Cocaine (or at least cocoa leaves) was commercially available in smokeable form as far back as the late 1800s. Freebasing cocaine has been popular since at least the 70s. Would it be possible for there to be significant traces of cocaine inside a mummy from those type of sources?
Admittedly yes nicotine and BE are not related. Yet one might ponder other sources. Nicotine is naturally found in other plants such as those of the nightshade family. The "tobacco" subfamily is simply the one of several which happens to have the highest levels of it. Yet the ancient Egyptians employed their incense which per ancient accounts the ingredients varied to include = members of this family of plants. So just as today people can be exposed to "secondhand smoke" - so being surrounded by a lifetime of incense burning in the case of royalty such as could afford mummification this appears a plausible source of exposure. Invariably incense would be used in the mummification process as well given its obvious ritual use. Also there appears to be evidence of their smoking as well - at least those who could afford it. "Shemshemet" is the term for ancient Egyptian smoking. So it is at least possible they were exposed to and possibly even using plants which contained nicotine. As to BE I would query as to the sensitivity of the test which looks for that specific metabolite and if again other sources might be considered. It is well documented that ancient peoples used various plants for medicinal purposes. Tutankhamen's tomb famously contained numerous samples of such. Among those used in antiquity = Mandrake - such as is found in the Mediterranean/Near East region. Today of course we recognize it as poisonous and hence we would not think of people using it. Yet it was employed in ancient medicine for among other things = pain relief. Thus if the mummy in question incurred pain in their latter stage of life for whatever reason might it be possible such plant extracts were used to mitigate that. Mandrakes are known for their containing tropane alkaloids - such as can break down into BE = hence my question. So might this account for BE in the mummy's system??? 🤔
Some people want to treat a topic like this as a conclusion. Others want to treat it as just the beginning of an investigation that needs to be continued and which considers a number of hypotheses. The people who treat it as a conclusion lean toward those who support fringe notions of hyperdiffusion even though it would not necessarily be the case even if it was established that limited amounts of cocaine somehow reached Egypt during the New Kingdom and later periods from S. America. I hadn't heard that the museum in Egypt refused access to the mummies. Seemed to me that Dr. David was more onboard with the idea that the mummies were probably authentic based on other evidence rather than speaking with great certainty in the wake of that refusal.
In that same program with Balabanova, there was a suggestion of trans pacific trade, it is known that the Polynesians have coursed the Pacific at least as far as the Rapanui of Easter Island and that the sweet potato, another plant said to have originated in the Americas has been found on Pacific islands and a Peruvian (I believe) anthropologist has a skull that purports to be Polynresian by morphology, shape of crown, cheekbone width etc.
True but the polynesian expansion is only around a 1200 year old history to present ...so the timelines don't match up...and it started in southeast Asia possibly even China ...but I see what you're saying that it might've gone in the other direction ... From South America ...just no evidence for it I guess
13:00 you say the Egyptians would have wanted to cut out the middle man. It would be likely that their hypothetical trading partners would have desired the opposite, and therefore refused to sell them the plants.
Dr. Miano let me first say that I agree with your thesis, and your conclusion. I like your style, your reasoning. There is one topic that I and probably others would like you to cover, and was reminded by this mummies. It's - Shroud of Turin. There were numerous religious and scientific claims about it. It is very hard to see what is truth and what is fiction. For me personally, even if it is a fraud, it is excellent fraud with above and beyond execution. If it is possible, can you make a video about it? I believe others would like to see your cunning mind in action. Thumbs up for dear Doctor David to see!
So, if you press a cloth over a human face covered in blood or paint, the resulting face print looks very wide & stretched out horizontally, very unlike the image on the actual shroud of turin, so it was almost certainly painted on, & was not authentic.
As I am from Munich I’d like to add some insight. The city is really rich and with that comes the use of expensive goods. Including cocain. I knew about the finding of cocain in mummies but was not aware of the connection to Munich. So I couldn’t help my self not to think about contamination. And I would not even flinch to say it might have been the shady museum director himself. We call those people „Großkopferte“ which is hard to translate but maybe like „big spenders“ in a not so nice way. Anyway, I had to chuckle.
There is the english term "bigwhigs" (große Perrücken) with the same meaning as the bavarian "Bighead", isn't it? Anyways, while as a Northerner I am always in for a good munich-bashing, a museums director being tight-lipped about questionable exponates is quite widespread, I'd say. Look at all the drama about the german ethnografic museums and how they aquired their collections from Africa and the pacific islands. Or how long it took to aknowledge the Vinland map as a forgery. Strange how Curators seem to think admitting errors and wrongdoings of precursors is more damaging to the institution than supressing scientific reviews of doubted matters. This director's reaction reeks of the same.
@@WorldofAntiquity I posted this elsewhere on this thread but I'm not sure if you would be able to catch it so I'm also posting it in response to your comment here, so that you are properly tagged. Anyway, this is what I posted: I knew as soon as I saw the subject matter in the thumbnail that contamination would be the most likely "solution" to the puzzle of the cocaine mummies, since in my research that is overwhelmingly the assumption that most skeptics take to this topic. However, while I agree that the evidence that there was some sort of trade between Egypt and South America is very thin on the ground, I can't totally accept the contamination hypothesis, either. First and foremost, the original researchers (Balabanova and her colleagues) were not fools; they absolutely looked for other possible explanations for their results including modern insecticide use, smoking archaeologists, a product of decomposition/contamination with other compounds over the centuries, etc. There are sophisticated ways to interpret the data to exclude such possibilities, which they absolutely used, and in the end they concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly showed that both the nicotine and cocaine had been ingested by the deceased and in concentrations greater than can be explained by the use of nicotine-laced insecticides or of incidental smoking/cocaine use around the mummies (it also seems rather ridiculous to me, as Miano implies here, that 19th century European aristocrats were just randomly snorting cocaine right next to their prized mummy possessions, LOL! C'mon now). To quote from an online article covering the subject: "The drugs were found in the hair, soft tissues, and bone of the specimens in ways that defy an explanation other than consumption. In other words, being shipped with cocaine or sprayed with insecticide isn’t enough to explain why the bones contained cocaine and nicotine. In fact, it *wasn’t* cocaine that was initially discovered, but benzoylecognine. This is the chemical left over in the body *after* a human metabolizes the cocaine. In all likelihood, they found the metabolite of nicotine as well, which is cotinine." Another thing Miano fails to mention--and this is pretty important, and a huge lapse of research in this clip--is that the test results were NOT relegated only to the 9 original mummies that formed the basis for Balabanova's first paper. Because of the the controversy over that first paper, she ended up testing *71* other mummies and found that 79% of them also showed cocaine and nicotine ingestion!! In addition, two other researchers, Parsche and Nerlich, tested *their* own mummies and also found the presence of THC, cocaine and nicotine (the THC readings can be explained, however, since the compound was in fact present in the Old World at that time). Miano makes it sound like the cocaine was only found in those initial 9 mummies and never duplicated in any other mummy tested since, and that is simply not true. This info can be easily found online (it took me 10 minutes of searching for articles on cocaine mummies to pull up the peer-reviewed papers on the other mummy tests--I can't link them here or UA-cam won't print my comment, but I suggest simply looking up the work of Balabanova, Parsche and Nerlich online; the 71 mummy followup by Balabanova is also mentioned in a number of web articles covering the topic). For these reasons, I do not believe contamination is the best answer to the mystery of the cocaine mummies. The original researchers--who even Miano admits were the world's leading experts in their field, and you don't get to that position by being sloppy--were thorough and already precluded most of the obvious possibilities for contamination. It is still possible, however, that there were other plants, now extinct, in the Old World at the time that contained nicotine or cocaine and that this could explain the mystery. As for pre-Columbian trade between the Old and New worlds, the evidence is very thin on the ground although it's interesting that Miano fails to mention, in his coverage of the evidence for trade in the clip, the fact that Australian aboriginal DNA has now been found in various tribes of the Amazon rain forest. And while a trade route between Australasia and South America would be different from that required for the Egyptians to get in on the action, it does at least make the possibility of such trade routes more than mere fantasy. Anyways, I would be interested to hear a response to all this. I do not write this out of malicious intent--I absolutely adore your channel, which I found when you only had 20k subscribers!--only surprise that some very important information has been left out of the research for this clip.
@@spiritof6663 *the original researchers (Balabanova and her colleagues) were not fools; they absolutely looked for other possible explanations for their results* Yes, and they allowed for other possibilities, as seen in what they said during the Edlin interview. I should add that someone like Mark Kearney, who is also in the field, is no fool either. *they concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly showed that both the nicotine and cocaine had been ingested by the deceased and in concentrations greater than can be explained by the use of nicotine-laced insecticides or of incidental smoking/cocaine use around the mummies* They never described the evidence as "overwhelming." And as I pointed out, only the stomach of one mummy was above the margin of error for cocaine. And that test wasn't even part of the original test. The hair and bones did not pass the test for cocaine. *the test results were NOT relegated only to the 9 original mummies that formed the basis for Balabanova's first paper. Because of the the controversy over that first paper, she ended up testing 71 other mummies and found that 79% of them also showed cocaine and nicotine ingestion!!* These tests were mentioned. They were part of the second article (the one from the Lancet). The mummies had come from around the world, not just Egypt. And they were from the collection of the Munich Museum. And again, NONE of the Egyptian mummies in that second paper passed the minimum threshold for cocaine. *even Miano admits were the world's leading experts in their field* I said they were among the leading experts, not THE leading experts. And their expertise is in forensic testing, not in Egyptian mummies. *Australian aboriginal DNA has now been found in various tribes of the Amazon rain forest. And while a trade route between Australasia and South America would be different from that required for the Egyptians to get in on the action, it does at least make the possibility of such trade routes more than mere fantasy.* I don't follow your logic. How does the presence of Australian aboriginal DNA, which is dated to long before the time we are considering, increase the probability of Egyptian seafaring to the Americas in any amount whatsoever? Lead us through the steps in your reasoning.
Ich bin ein Nachbar. Und solche Beamten gibt es überall. In unserem Land werden sie Hlavoun (hlava = Kopf, Suffix -oun agent) oder papaláš (inf. papat = essen, = Suffix -ás des Trägers eines Merkmals) oder Navel genannt, was durchaus metaphorisch passt und uns an das erinnert sprichwörtlicher buddhistischer Mönch, den er so lange liebevoll auf seinen Nabel blickte, dass es ihm vorkam, als hätte er einen Heiligenschein um seinen Nabel. Bei kulturellen und ökologischen Institutionen kommt es häufig zu solchen Behinderungen, und offenbar geht es tatsächlich um die Aufrechterhaltung einer Art Ausnahme-, Bedeutungs- und Machtstatus gesellschaftlich machtloser und unbedeutender Personen. Tom 49/44/29//13/22/57
This is an interesting topic that I saw when originally aired. As usual, the good Doctor brings his abundance of sense and caution to a subject that is still a bit of a mystery.
It’s tragic this channel and its type aren’t what’s on history channel etc instead of the nonsense it debunks. Thanks for doing this. I know well respected phd chemists who fall for the nonsense ancient aliens style stuff on tv because of an assumption of good faith and what not. Infinitely frustrating. Keep up the good work!
I remember when this hit the public. Extreme proponents were comparing 'amazing similarities' between common words from various languages on both continents.
I agree about the crops, but even more so the wood! The Egyptians loved Lebanon cedar, imagine what they would have thought about all those tropical hardwoods from the South American rainforests.
Wow! Great Break Down & Awesome info! I've been wanting a thorough analysis of the #cocainemummies like this for years. Im so glad you did this. I had no idea nicotine could be found in celery 😂 I also had no idea there were species of plant in Africa related to the New World Coco plant that cocaine is made from. I see that Svetlana Balabanova knew about both of these plants from Africa. I don't understand why she didn't mention these plants as a possible source when she 1st announced her discovery? I see it as highly plausible the Egyptians had access to those plants. Possibly from the expidetion to Punt you mentioned our some other possible connections to the Africa inner land deeper south.
Hyerdall was a dealer, no doubt!!!!!! Like all Miano's vidz, really facinating, and grippingly told!!!!!! And have to say, growing pot in Humbolt & Mendocino, we used nicotine based insecticides to kill mites and grape mold (would come from the damn vinyards)
Question : cocaine was found in the mummy's stomach. does that mean that (unusually) the stomach was still in place, or just that they also had access to the canopic jars and tested the contents too?
I myself doubt any trans-Atlantic crossings in antiquity but if there were I imagine they may have involved the Canary Islanders. I believe a few of their mummies still exist. Have these been tested for these substances?
I think i read somewhere that the Bering Strait was still used for naval crossing after the land bridge was submerged, there's even been genetic exchange between the two sides through time. Thought it was probably just native migrations and it never really "connected" the Americas to the other side of the world like the true trans-atlantic route.
whether or not anyone from anywhere travelled to the americas (they did) before the age of discovery is meaningless besides being an interesting sidenote of history, because none of them brought anything back either physically or by word of mouth that ever made a difference to the history of any culture anywhere. I really increasingly get annoyed at how much weight people put on this question.
I remember when the news of this first broke & I have seen that documentary you mentioned (I watch a lot of docs about ancient Egypt, Greece & Rome plus follow certain Egyptologists & university lecture series here on YT) My first thought was contamination. My second thought was that it could possibly be plants from the same/similar family as coca/tobacco & have a similar molecular signature thru degradation. I'm not a paleo botanist so I don't even know if that's possible. I've always wondered if this was ever proven/disproven diffinitively or not.
It is also important to remember that cocaine, nicotine, cannabis and opium were common drugs in the 19th century. If I'm not mistaken, King Ludwig was not averse to these substances. There were a lot of parties at that time where mummies were exhibited, where people smoked (tobacco, cannabis, opium) and probably also did coke and did other occult or perverse things with the mummies. Contamination may well have occurred.
Yes. There was a time when Egyptian artifacts were "all the rage" - while as you alluded to "people of society" often indulged in substances which are today illegal absent a prescription - but which used to be quite ubiquitous in the general population. Therefore it is a reasonable ask to consider what a mummy might have been exposed to at some point during what was a shifting chain of custody at a time when people did not take precautions to prevent contamination as modern archeologists et al do today.
Thank you for posting this. I've been seeing psuedo-ancient history pages on FB posting this inaccurate history and I get annoyed having to explain that mummies still have "lives" long after their original findings.
How little affect the many CSI TV shows have had on the public ability to understand scientific investigation of such things! Our educational systems seem to be failing us.
@@JMM33RanMA CSI was riddled with inaccuracies and unscientific gobbledegook. They didn't even know how to undo a ziptie without cutting it. They didn't know that iron sulphide does not melt. Just two examples among many.
@@pattheplanter True enough, just like the "medical" shows. I used to have fun pointing out such things. The point was that they present, like the equally flawed exploits of Sherlock Holmes, that analysis and critical thinking are needed to understand and solve problems. What the Red Hats and other Q believers do, is not analysis or critical thinking.
This reminded me of a video by Atunshei about the possibility that the ancient Egyptians (maybe Phoenicians, I cant quite remember) circumnavigated Africa, I think this would make an interesting topic to cover on your channel
Have you had a chance to read David Graeber and David Wengrow's new book "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"? The Notes, Bibliography, and Index combined are about a half-inch thick, the book itself is about an inch and a half thick - so they seem to document their analysis pretty well. I was quite impressed with Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" - well-written and seemingly well-supported.
First time seeing the channel, great video! I can tell you put a lot of work into knowing what you're talking about and presenting it in an open and understandable way. Keep up the good work
This is the sole channel on the internet I would click "cocaine mummies" and think the content I was getting served would be factual. Please keep up the good work!
Yes, since I know this channel, a lot of thing I got wrong or wondered were clarified
Not allowing another look by someone else at the Mummies in question is a deal breaker for me. Repeatability is a foundation of science. Even in my own humble experience, when I worked in Q.A., if any of us got an unusual result the first thing we'd do is ask someone else if they were seeing the same thing, getting the same measurements. Evidence others aren't allowed to verify isn't evidence.
Exactly correct
Totes
One possible reason is they may know the mummies are fake and are embarrassed that the original buyer (that German king, I think) was duped by the English man.
@@eddielopez5708 embarrassed for someone else ..who is now long gone ?
@@oftin_wong The museums reputation. They don't want the museum's name tarnished.
If there's not a band called Cocaine Mummies yet, I'm starting one. Thanks, David, for another fascinating video.
We're getting the band back together 😎
I have dibs on guitarist 😂
There is one song on UA-cam called Heaven Can Wait ..😅
If u have a spot for an accordionist i'm in. I will keep low level, not contaminate the rest👍
Looks like the domain name is available
Literally the only logical explanation is the mummy ingested both cocaine and nicotine shortly after the tomb was breached and the curse activated. Definitely scary for the archeologists to deal with a coked-out mummy.
Cocaine's a hell of a drug
I was of the impression that "being a mummy" and "breathing" are mutually exclusive states to be in.
He the mummy would certainly have a lot to say. Like when you get the quiet person to talk and now you have to hear every thought that they didn't tell others.
Cocaine in ancient Egypt could explain how the Sphinx's nose fell off...
Well played sir
😂
Meth would have been a more believable culprit for the missing nose. If they find that then I'm sure it was a contamination.
That begs the question ...... did they test for opioids? Or just THC/Nicotine/Coke? The test graphs are remarkably thin and short.
@jholloway77 - .^_^.
not bad lol
Those same drugs were found on me in college.
We lost the chance to be classmates 😘😘
Mummy? Is that you?
Jr High for me lol
Not as impressive in the modern world. But good on you for keeping our ancestors traditions.
Late 80s blonde hash with pink or blue coke.
Been curious about this for decades, thank you for the professional examination!
the idea of the king of Bavaria partying with a mummy while snorting cocaine is really doing it for me
I personally prefer the image of an archeologist deciding that a mummy examination is good time to snort coke.
The cocaine may have come from the cocaine-fortified wine Vin Mariani, which was advertised in 1899 with the tagline: "Les Momies elles-mêmes se Dressent et marchant quand elles ont bu du Vin Mariani." "The Mummies themselves Rise and walk when they have drunk Vin Mariani." Some idiot aristocrat probably tried it at a party, mostly on one mummy but getting some on the others.
I honestly think this is a more colorful story than the ancient egyptians somehow having contact with the Americas for the sole reason of getting coca leaves.
In the Victorian era, some rich people did have mummy unwrapping parties. It's not as out there as some might think lol
My first thought at the beginning of this video was: "Maybe there exists some Old World plants that contain cocaine or some other substance that reacts like cocaine in the tests," Then, much later in the video I started to think the contamination hypothesis sounded even better. What we need is more data, accurate data not denied by some museum curator's need to keep this mystery up.
There are. Hall of Maat has an article on this and there are indigenous African plants that produce the same alkaloids.
@@BasedKungFu Well that sounds interesting. Do some of those plants contain something like cocaine?
I feel like we would need to see secondary metabolites. OK. At some point the mummy got white lightning on it. Was it being processed by the body?
Reminds of these flied police drug tests that give high percent false positives due prescription drugs.
I bet some grad students were hanging out in the same room as the mummies, smoking cigarettes, having drinks, doing some lines, then one of them sneezed and the coke went everywhere then they went "Oh shit, we gotta get out of here!"
😂
😂
I mean the archeologist who claimed this theory has a name from the same country whose entire sports team always tests positive for doping... who quickly change nationality to German to avoid getting their "grandpa's heart medicine" get to "accidentally contaminate" everything around them.
I really love your videos. Great explanation with no snarky or mean condescending. I really wish Joe Rogan and other big platforms would have you on to cut through the blather about ancient history
Sadly, not much money in actually bothering to just say true things. Rogan is such a nasty figure with what he does.
YES! I've been waiting for this episode!
call me when they find CHOCOLATE! 🤣 love those hashish numbers on the peru vs egypt table though 😂😂😂
I have often heard references to this and didn't know what to think. Thank you for your comprehensive review.
And thank you!
Nicotine pesticides are still used today. It's especially easy to make at home (tobacco + water). Being used on mummies in the 1800's to get rid of bugs makes a lot of sense...not to forget all the snuff being used at that time too which was easily dispersed in the air and probably settled on everything. Have they run these tests on any recently found mummies? Seems like that would be an important thing to push for. Great video!
im pretty sure anything in my possession would fail a drug test right along with me 😂
The treatment of tobacco with lye as described in the video would produce the free nicotine alkaloid, not the salt often used in insecticides. This free alkaloid is much more soluble in lipids and resins, non-polar substances. It would, therefore, travel very easily into the tissues of the mummy.
Maybe with more modern discovered mummies they'd find traces of Raid... and someone conclude Egyptian pyramids were time-travelling machines!
Yeh but they tested bone teeth soft tissue ...you can see it in the journal text and tables ...so not just testing the skin surface
That would be bad science
@@oftin_wong Nicotine is a very small and mobile chemical.
Aweseome as always, BUT he made a logical fumble a 13:12. He asks "wouldnt the Egyptians start growing coca plants in Egypt?". We MODERNS (both law abiding and criminals) have been striving to get coca plants to grow outside of the Andes for centuries and failed. Its a picayune plant that just wont grow in places not the Andes and it tropical but high altitude climate, or something.. The low altitude flat land of Egypt has little resemblence to the plants homeland so you wouldnt expect coca to grow there ( and I am sure SOME modern folks have tried to grow it Egypt just like theyve tried everwhere else).
Good point.
Don't forget that the Egyptian empire extended up to the rain forests of Lake Victoria and beyond. All of "Egypt" is not hot and dry.
I remember this. My first thought was that when ancient Egypt had any sort of contact with another nation, however casual, they tended to write about it in terms like "Behold, the kings of faraway lands submit to my rule and grovel at my feet, and agree that Egypt rules, others drool!" But they're not even going to mention the farthest-away land they "conquered"? They're not going to trumpet their accomplishment in sailing farther than any other nation dreamed possible and being the conquerors of a whole other continent?
Didn't they quarry copper from Britian and Afghanistan? Very wide stretching empire.
@@SalTarvitz Not as far as I know. Sure you're not thinking of tin? The Phoenicians might've bought British tin, but as far as I know there's no evidence for Egyptian traders reaching that far; they really weren't interested in that part of the world nor would they have had much of a sense of northwestern Europe. Besides, they would've had much closer sources of copper than Britain and Afghanistan, such as the Sinai.
@@valmarsiglia Most Tin in Bronze age Europe came from Western Europe. Egypt also got their Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan. Though these usually came from middle men.
@@something1600 yup, there's no bronze age without globalization, so any guys who claim about going back to "good old times" before race mixing and foreign trade, would need to retvrn to literally stone age. As you can't get an industrial supply of bronze without mingling with foreigners.
Perfect timing! I've been binge-watching your content lately, and you've quickly become one of my favourite channels! Looking forward to this :D
Nicotine, Cocaine and THC found? I knew I could get along just fine in ancient Egypt 😂 👌 💯
Don’t forgot the opium!
Thank you for your continued quality work!
"Cocaine is a hell of a drug"
- Rick James
I have no idea what mumies are discused here, but in the 1800's, cocaine was freely available in europe over the counter, as was tobaco and canabis, it is certain that contamination before the tests were done could acout for these findings, how long were the mumies left open to view by people taking such drugs, perhaps even taking drugs in the presense of the mumies over time that could acount for the findings.
Very logical. Too logical.
You don't want to disrupt the status quo of the "mainstream fringe theorists" living in their ivory towers.
Yes there is no reason that the mummies did not get in contact with the drugs that were freely available in the 19th century and in some countries even later.
Great vid. Great handling of info
This reminds me of the kumara debacle: people think there was contact with the Americas, and the people only brought back one plant? Can you imagine if the old world had access to corn!?
Potatoes!!!
@@punkykenickie2408You say Potatoes!!! I say Tomatoes!!!
I literally cannot imagine food without potatoes, tomatoes, and bell pepper. This is like THE staple in Eastern Europe. WTF were our ancestors eating before trade with Americas, just beetroot?
@KasumiRINA Bell peppers? They taste like herbal and slightly bitter water with a crunch, I don't know how you get excited about that...at least jalapeños taste like something. But yeah, potatoes and tomatoes are nice.
Excellent. And the narrator has special talents as a scientific presenter.
I remember watching that documentary when it came out. The whole time I watched it, I kept thinking of the photos in the early 19th century of mummies displayed outside sold to collectors and the amount of contamination must have been present.
Cocaine was isolated in 1855. And shortly after people started using it a lot. At first most commonly in expensive wines, but it wouldn't be long before it's being sold as just cocaine. And those 19th century pictures of mummies you saw were likely privately owned mummies. And who owns mummies and does a lot of cocaine? Rich people of course. I always thought 19th century contamination was a likely reason too.
I saw that documentary as well, or at least one documentary about this. Cool this channel adresses this mystery because it remained an unexplanable fact in my mind for decades. But in my memory, there were similar tests done on European mummies and ancient corpses found almost intact in bogs, and they had nicotine and cocaine on them too, according to the scientists in the documentary. Strange World of Antiquity isnt adressing these researches.
Not only had they nicotine found in the hair, but I remember they said that the leels of nicotine were so high, that if that ancient person had consumed it, he or she would have died of nicotine overdose, so high the levels were.
Maybe ground for another ideo about this mystery?
I messaged you a few weeks back asking your opinion on ancient travel so it’s great to listen to your thoughts on this Dr Miano.
Spectacular subject choice!
Top notch research & info, tippin my hat to the Dr. for this video
Salute to you & your work Doc!
I chewed coca leaves when I was in Peru and drank coca tea. It really helps with stomach ailments and altitude sickness. We used the leaves in a despacho prayer ceremony as well and burned them to carry the prayers to the heavens. The leaves are precious to many people there and are almost another form of currency.
And, are you a mummy ? XD
Lot people did this while on travel the last decades, i imagine.
What would you say the effects of ingesting the leaves is compared to powder? Asking for a friend. Also if you've never done powder or don't want to say, I totally understand. I used to be an addict myself many years ago, but I've always been curious what it's natural form is like.
@@talkingmudcrab718 its more like strong coffee
@@talkingmudcrab718 it’s like the difference between drinking a cup of coffee, and sniffing pure caffeine. You don’t get much of a rush, and really don’t feel anything at all. But drink or chew a lot, and you won’t fall asleep all night. Once I went to the cemetery to visit my Peruvian wife’s grandmas grave. A lot of family arrived, with a big bag of leaves and a case of beer. After chewing and drinking for a couple hours we went down to a real sketchy area to catch a bus. I remember feeling invincible, and actually hoping someone would try something. I’m normally pretty peaceful, but that day I was ready to go!
I went on a hike to a peak on the Altiplano n on the way back got super swimmy and had some coca leaf tea and i dunno if it made me more or less high than being literally high on the altitude cuz i was pretty toasty
What a fascinating journey into this topic!
What a video, super well researched, produced and presented. I have in fact wondered about this topic for so many years now, and this answered a lot of my burning questions. Thank you so much!
I remember seeing a documentary about an autopsy of a baby mammoth found in Russia. If someone treated a mummy as cavalierly as they treated that baby mammoth, I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover it was contaminated
Very good scholarly plausible doubt shed on a popular if far-fetched theory. You and your glasses have my compliments.
Thanks! Oops! It showed up! Thanks for the super video. I have a little too much month at the end of my money to do a whole lot, but I am glad I was able to place it on this video because I really liked the way you did it. I do like the fact that you give so many ways for us all to fact check you as well with the references you have provided. Great work David!
Thank you!
Very well presented. This could've been a scientific paper - in fact, I think you should present your findings as such, as well.
Thank you. Most of what I brought out was in scientific papers. I will post the links shortly.
LOL he didnt even mention that cocaine vas found in the hair and that that couldnt be contamined.
@@ramsaysnow9196 Pay attention next time you watch the video.
Thank you for all the sound and rational explonation here 👍👍👍👍
Dr Miano, ayyye I'm glad you covered this.
This is my first time viewing your content. I have to say, you appear to have more of a preference for figuring out the truth over what you think you know is right.
It's a refreshing take as opposed to hearing straight up ignorant, misinformed, disproven, condescending, and ultimately laughable statements and views from "highly educated and intelligent" self-appointed deities.
Keep it up. I love it.
I have subscribed, and hit the notification bell! You not only woke me up about " ancient lost, advanced civilizations," but woke me up to the beauty and majesty of the real past. Many thanks.
Oh, quite a few musicians in the comments want to form a band called ' Cocaine Mummies.' Are you up for being a manager? 😊 I was hair strand tested once. Proved positive for cocaine. Never took any. 🤔
Did that actually happen?
@@WorldofAntiquityI've read cases that seem like it is likely that hair tests are not as reliable as they like to present
@@WorldofAntiquityplease do a video on how Egyptians used to claim sites as there own by chiping away older predecessors hyroglifics
Thanks!
And thank you!
Brilliant and well done. Thank you for this video. Been scratching my head for years about this. The cocaine issue collapsed entirely because they refuse to allow examination to validate the mummy that had a "genuine" positive result, for reasons that would have also prevented the initial examination...hmmm...I can almost hear them in the background mumbling "of course our mummies are real .. honest, trust us ...and no peeking." And I did not know about the tobacco insecticide washes. Explains it, no question. You went deep on this one, well done. Most excellent, keep pushing this video, please. As I started with, it's brilliant.
Sure, test 'repeatability' is key, though hair traces are also a pretty reliable indicator, and the lack of cocaine evidence in others wouldn't be so surprising, since even if it was somehow 'imported' from the Americas, such a commodity would almost certainly be the utmost rarity that only a few royals could even afford.
Thanks! I've enjoyed your entire Myths series ... my dad believes in all of them... :)
Thank you!
Great video David and thank you! I love the method of investigation and obviously the honest work and research you put into your work. I am learning alot from your channel especially on how to research a topic and delve into history.
I love ancient history and from my experience some of us can be easily misled by fringe theories and some total nonsense, like Brian Forrester for example. Great head to head with Uncharted X by the way.
Your travel series guide is very enjoyable too.
Thank you David is what I'm trying to say.
Thanks David, another excellent presentation. Keep it up !
I like how Mark Kearney wrote that 'unlike what Eric Clapton said cocaine can lie'
The ghost of J J Cale weeps
Thanks for going into this .
Great video. That was so informative and a master class in how to apply critical thinking skills to anomalous results. I would be fascinated and excited if there were credible evidence of contact between the Americas and Africa/Eurasia before the 15th century (as ther is for the Vikings in North America) but these test results aren’t enough to jump to that interpretation. Keep these results in mind in case further evidence crops up but they’re too ambiguous without other findings.
A great in-depth look at the problem, thank you.
To tell you the truth....🧐
I'm not here for the mummies....😉
I will sit quietly and learn☺️
I enjoyed your trip to Egypt 😊😊
If i had the budget i would go my self 😞
Its swimming distance away from Greece 😂😂...
and still is bit expensive .
Im very glad for you 😊😊
Thank you for the video you brought us from Egypt,😘😘😘
I know its very time consuming and fun spoiling to record the trip.
That's why we love you 😘
P s
The debunkings as well 🤣🤣
Please make more 🤗🤗
A fascinating video, thank you so much 👏👏👏
It seems a bit strange that the mummified bodies in Germany are not allowed to be seen, given that the (old) Egyptian Museum had a room (which you could enter for the price of an additional ticket) specifically for people to view the mummified pharaohs. I'm presuming the new museum will have the same. Rosalie David is an extremely well-respected Egyptologist and served as director of the International Mummy Database, so why were they not more accommodating? 🤔
It is pretty suspicious and reminds me of some other controversial issues, such as that involving a certain dictator's skull whose name I can't mention on UA-cam.
I've seen Egyptian mummies at museums in the US before. Are they replicas?
Love your hacker sensibilities of releasing a booklet for free. It both puts you in a good light and makes knowledge of/interest in history more attainable! Do good things for others and you will be rewarded!
Yay! I read about this many years ago!
Thank you! 😂
Danke!
And thank you!
You always gotta remind people that 1 or 2 test results done by the same person is the scientific equivalent of "i heard from my ma, who heard from her cousin that..."
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on this, but I thought I had read that a big reason the Egyptians didn't expand their borders the way other major civilizations did was that they believed either that you had to die in Egypt, or maybe your body had to be enshrined in Egypt, to make it to the afterlife. I can't remember which of those two it was. I would think the same concerns would prevent them from sailing across the Atlantic.
Both Egypt and China had a philosophy which placed themselves at the centre of the world: the pinnacle and the most civilised. They just didn't think there was anything worth having nearby: surrounded by deserts and mountains. The reason they didn't sail out into the Atlantic is the same reason you wouldn't do that: you would die. No one believed there was land beyond the old world until they bumped into it by accident.
@@PlatinumAltaria yes...no reason to leave the fertile lands
Although the Vikings did ...because their population increased beyond the lands carrying capacity ...limited land around the fjords
@@oftin_wong No, they left because southern kingdoms would offer money for them as mercenaries, or else they could just steal from those kingdoms. It wasn't about land.
@@PlatinumAltaria it was about land ..they became known as mercenaries like any good fighters but that came later ..they wanted land in England and France and they got it ..
The actually land area around the fjords is very limited because of the steep inclines and mountains directly adjacent which reduces the amount of arable farmland to a static amount ...the land was fertile ...very much so, but extremely limited ...same reason they colonised Iceland and Greenland ... briefly during a particularly warm phase but then later abandoned it
I still keep an open mind of the possibility of trans Atlantic voyages. As you say, no chilies or tomatoes before Columbus indicates it was very rare if at all. Certainly it wasn’t a trade route. However the Vikings did it, and it left almost no evidence. I do feel the contamination hypothesis is very strong. So at this point, I’d say it’s possible, but there is a lack of convincing evidence.
Hanlon's razor tells us to assume Balabanova snorted cocaine near mummies and then tried to cover it up.
I was trying to find out more about this topic and every single video was conspiracy riddled! I'm so happy I found you!! ❤❤
I will be teaching my college level course on forensic drug analysis starting in April. This video is very timely. Will show it when we cover cocaine analysis. BTW, benzoyl econine and nicotine have very different chemical structures. Thus it is highly unlikely nicotine could be connverted into BE by some embalming process.
Tropanes are more similar to ecgonine and benzoic acid is a component of some gum resins. However, I feel it more likely the cocaine came from Vin Mariani, which was advertised in 1899 with the tagline: "Les Momies elles-mêmes se Dressent et marchant quand elles ont bu du Vin Mariani." "The Mummies themselves Rise and walk when they have drunk Vin Mariani." Some idiot aristocrat probably tried it at a party, mostly on one mummy but getting some on the others.
Maybe you can answer a question given your expertise. Cocaine (or at least cocoa leaves) was commercially available in smokeable form as far back as the late 1800s. Freebasing cocaine has been popular since at least the 70s. Would it be possible for there to be significant traces of cocaine inside a mummy from those type of sources?
Admittedly yes nicotine and BE are not related. Yet one might ponder other sources. Nicotine is naturally found in other plants such as those of the nightshade family. The "tobacco" subfamily is simply the one of several which happens to have the highest levels of it. Yet the ancient Egyptians employed their incense which per ancient accounts the ingredients varied to include = members of this family of plants.
So just as today people can be exposed to "secondhand smoke" - so being surrounded by a lifetime of incense burning in the case of royalty such as could afford mummification this appears a plausible source of exposure. Invariably incense would be used in the mummification process as well given its obvious ritual use. Also there appears to be evidence of their smoking as well - at least those who could afford it. "Shemshemet" is the term for ancient Egyptian smoking. So it is at least possible they were exposed to and possibly even using plants which contained nicotine.
As to BE I would query as to the sensitivity of the test which looks for that specific metabolite and if again other sources might be considered. It is well documented that ancient peoples used various plants for medicinal purposes. Tutankhamen's tomb famously contained numerous samples of such. Among those used in antiquity = Mandrake - such as is found in the Mediterranean/Near East region. Today of course we recognize it as poisonous and hence we would not think of people using it. Yet it was employed in ancient medicine for among other things = pain relief.
Thus if the mummy in question incurred pain in their latter stage of life for whatever reason might it be possible such plant extracts were used to mitigate that. Mandrakes are known for their containing tropane alkaloids - such as can break down into BE = hence my question. So might this account for BE in the mummy's system??? 🤔
I wish I could have taken your class ❤
Some people want to treat a topic like this as a conclusion. Others want to treat it as just the beginning of an investigation that needs to be continued and which considers a number of hypotheses. The people who treat it as a conclusion lean toward those who support fringe notions of hyperdiffusion even though it would not necessarily be the case even if it was established that limited amounts of cocaine somehow reached Egypt during the New Kingdom and later periods from S. America.
I hadn't heard that the museum in Egypt refused access to the mummies. Seemed to me that Dr. David was more onboard with the idea that the mummies were probably authentic based on other evidence rather than speaking with great certainty in the wake of that refusal.
Very interesting David. I think your summary and conclusions were as spot on as we can expect.
I really learned a great deal with this video. Thank you so much for your hard work, Prof. Miano! You're doing very important work.
In that same program with Balabanova, there was a suggestion of trans pacific trade, it is known that the Polynesians have coursed the Pacific at least as far as the Rapanui of Easter Island and that the sweet potato, another plant said to have originated in the Americas has been found on Pacific islands and a Peruvian (I believe) anthropologist has a skull that purports to be Polynresian by morphology, shape of crown, cheekbone width etc.
True but the polynesian expansion is only around a 1200 year old history to present ...so the timelines don't match up...and it started in southeast Asia possibly even China ...but I see what you're saying that it might've gone in the other direction ... From South America ...just no evidence for it I guess
Another good one. Fabulously fascinating.
13:00 you say the Egyptians would have wanted to cut out the middle man. It would be likely that their hypothetical trading partners would have desired the opposite, and therefore refused to sell them the plants.
Could be.
Great opening statement. Not sure if you try to do the same one everytime or not, but this one worked very well.
Dr. Miano let me first say that I agree with your thesis, and your conclusion. I like your style, your reasoning.
There is one topic that I and probably others would like you to cover, and was reminded by this mummies. It's - Shroud of Turin.
There were numerous religious and scientific claims about it. It is very hard to see what is truth and what is fiction. For me personally, even if it is a fraud, it is excellent fraud with above and beyond execution. If it is possible, can you make a video about it? I believe others would like to see your cunning mind in action. Thumbs up for dear Doctor David to see!
So, if you press a cloth over a human face covered in blood or paint, the resulting face print looks very wide & stretched out horizontally, very unlike the image on the actual shroud of turin, so it was almost certainly painted on, & was not authentic.
Thank you! It really was everything I needed to know. Thanks again for the hard work and research.
As I am from Munich I’d like to add some insight. The city is really rich and with that comes the use of expensive goods. Including cocain. I knew about the finding of cocain in mummies but was not aware of the connection to Munich. So I couldn’t help my self not to think about contamination. And I would not even flinch to say it might have been the shady museum director himself. We call those people „Großkopferte“ which is hard to translate but maybe like „big spenders“ in a not so nice way. Anyway, I had to chuckle.
Interesting!
There is the english term "bigwhigs" (große Perrücken) with the same meaning as the bavarian "Bighead", isn't it?
Anyways, while as a Northerner I am always in for a good munich-bashing, a museums director being tight-lipped about questionable exponates is quite widespread, I'd say. Look at all the drama about the german ethnografic museums and how they aquired their collections from Africa and the pacific islands. Or how long it took to aknowledge the Vinland map as a forgery. Strange how Curators seem to think admitting errors and wrongdoings of precursors is more damaging to the institution than supressing scientific reviews of doubted matters. This director's reaction reeks of the same.
@@WorldofAntiquity I posted this elsewhere on this thread but I'm not sure if you would be able to catch it so I'm also posting it in response to your comment here, so that you are properly tagged. Anyway, this is what I posted:
I knew as soon as I saw the subject matter in the thumbnail that contamination would be the most likely "solution" to the puzzle of the cocaine mummies, since in my research that is overwhelmingly the assumption that most skeptics take to this topic. However, while I agree that the evidence that there was some sort of trade between Egypt and South America is very thin on the ground, I can't totally accept the contamination hypothesis, either. First and foremost, the original researchers (Balabanova and her colleagues) were not fools; they absolutely looked for other possible explanations for their results including modern insecticide use, smoking archaeologists, a product of decomposition/contamination with other compounds over the centuries, etc. There are sophisticated ways to interpret the data to exclude such possibilities, which they absolutely used, and in the end they concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly showed that both the nicotine and cocaine had been ingested by the deceased and in concentrations greater than can be explained by the use of nicotine-laced insecticides or of incidental smoking/cocaine use around the mummies (it also seems rather ridiculous to me, as Miano implies here, that 19th century European aristocrats were just randomly snorting cocaine right next to their prized mummy possessions, LOL! C'mon now).
To quote from an online article covering the subject: "The drugs were found in the hair, soft tissues, and bone of the specimens in ways that defy an explanation other than consumption. In other words, being shipped with cocaine or sprayed with insecticide isn’t enough to explain why the bones contained cocaine and nicotine. In fact, it *wasn’t* cocaine that was initially discovered, but benzoylecognine. This is the chemical left over in the body *after* a human metabolizes the cocaine. In all likelihood, they found the metabolite of nicotine as well, which is cotinine."
Another thing Miano fails to mention--and this is pretty important, and a huge lapse of research in this clip--is that the test results were NOT relegated only to the 9 original mummies that formed the basis for Balabanova's first paper. Because of the the controversy over that first paper, she ended up testing *71* other mummies and found that 79% of them also showed cocaine and nicotine ingestion!! In addition, two other researchers, Parsche and Nerlich, tested *their* own mummies and also found the presence of THC, cocaine and nicotine (the THC readings can be explained, however, since the compound was in fact present in the Old World at that time). Miano makes it sound like the cocaine was only found in those initial 9 mummies and never duplicated in any other mummy tested since, and that is simply not true. This info can be easily found online (it took me 10 minutes of searching for articles on cocaine mummies to pull up the peer-reviewed papers on the other mummy tests--I can't link them here or UA-cam won't print my comment, but I suggest simply looking up the work of Balabanova, Parsche and Nerlich online; the 71 mummy followup by Balabanova is also mentioned in a number of web articles covering the topic).
For these reasons, I do not believe contamination is the best answer to the mystery of the cocaine mummies. The original researchers--who even Miano admits were the world's leading experts in their field, and you don't get to that position by being sloppy--were thorough and already precluded most of the obvious possibilities for contamination. It is still possible, however, that there were other plants, now extinct, in the Old World at the time that contained nicotine or cocaine and that this could explain the mystery. As for pre-Columbian trade between the Old and New worlds, the evidence is very thin on the ground although it's interesting that Miano fails to mention, in his coverage of the evidence for trade in the clip, the fact that Australian aboriginal DNA has now been found in various tribes of the Amazon rain forest. And while a trade route between Australasia and South America would be different from that required for the Egyptians to get in on the action, it does at least make the possibility of such trade routes more than mere fantasy. Anyways, I would be interested to hear a response to all this. I do not write this out of malicious intent--I absolutely adore your channel, which I found when you only had 20k subscribers!--only surprise that some very important information has been left out of the research for this clip.
@@spiritof6663 *the original researchers (Balabanova and her colleagues) were not fools; they absolutely looked for other possible explanations for their results*
Yes, and they allowed for other possibilities, as seen in what they said during the Edlin interview. I should add that someone like Mark Kearney, who is also in the field, is no fool either.
*they concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly showed that both the nicotine and cocaine had been ingested by the deceased and in concentrations greater than can be explained by the use of nicotine-laced insecticides or of incidental smoking/cocaine use around the mummies*
They never described the evidence as "overwhelming." And as I pointed out, only the stomach of one mummy was above the margin of error for cocaine. And that test wasn't even part of the original test. The hair and bones did not pass the test for cocaine.
*the test results were NOT relegated only to the 9 original mummies that formed the basis for Balabanova's first paper. Because of the the controversy over that first paper, she ended up testing 71 other mummies and found that 79% of them also showed cocaine and nicotine ingestion!!*
These tests were mentioned. They were part of the second article (the one from the Lancet). The mummies had come from around the world, not just Egypt. And they were from the collection of the Munich Museum. And again, NONE of the Egyptian mummies in that second paper passed the minimum threshold for cocaine.
*even Miano admits were the world's leading experts in their field*
I said they were among the leading experts, not THE leading experts. And their expertise is in forensic testing, not in Egyptian mummies.
*Australian aboriginal DNA has now been found in various tribes of the Amazon rain forest. And while a trade route between Australasia and South America would be different from that required for the Egyptians to get in on the action, it does at least make the possibility of such trade routes more than mere fantasy.*
I don't follow your logic. How does the presence of Australian aboriginal DNA, which is dated to long before the time we are considering, increase the probability of Egyptian seafaring to the Americas in any amount whatsoever? Lead us through the steps in your reasoning.
Ich bin ein Nachbar. Und solche Beamten gibt es überall. In unserem Land werden sie Hlavoun (hlava = Kopf, Suffix -oun agent) oder papaláš (inf. papat = essen, = Suffix -ás des Trägers eines Merkmals) oder Navel genannt, was durchaus metaphorisch passt und uns an das erinnert sprichwörtlicher buddhistischer Mönch, den er so lange liebevoll auf seinen Nabel blickte, dass es ihm vorkam, als hätte er einen Heiligenschein um seinen Nabel. Bei kulturellen und ökologischen Institutionen kommt es häufig zu solchen Behinderungen, und offenbar geht es tatsächlich um die Aufrechterhaltung einer Art Ausnahme-, Bedeutungs- und Machtstatus gesellschaftlich machtloser und unbedeutender Personen.
Tom 49/44/29//13/22/57
Great research ! Kudos!
This is an interesting topic that I saw when originally aired. As usual, the good Doctor brings his abundance of sense and caution to a subject that is still a bit of a mystery.
It’s tragic this channel and its type aren’t what’s on history channel etc instead of the nonsense it debunks. Thanks for doing this. I know well respected phd chemists who fall for the nonsense ancient aliens style stuff on tv because of an assumption of good faith and what not. Infinitely frustrating. Keep up the good work!
I remember when this hit the public. Extreme proponents were comparing 'amazing similarities' between common words from various languages on both continents.
humans gonna human. they also got real mad when it was revealed the first humans into the UK lands were dark skinned
I don't know if NAD was the thing.
@@beepboop204 how dare they!
@@birgbirg111 emotions and identity
Fascinating video! I just love the in depth history mystery content. More vids like this please!
Cocaine mummies, you mean Keith Richards?
Ive never clicked on a video faster in my life
“The cocaine mummies” sounds like a great band name. They should play a double bill with “Monkeypox”.
Thank you, Dr. David 🤗 i watched the documentarys re. "The Cocaine Mummies" and i appreciate you filling in some of the "blanks"!
I agree about the crops, but even more so the wood! The Egyptians loved Lebanon cedar, imagine what they would have thought about all those tropical hardwoods from the South American rainforests.
Excellent work on the Click-baity title. Love your channel.
Thank you!
It's not "click-bait" if it's accurate, imo.
Thank you for this. I remember the early reports, which were amazing. Now, it seems a lot more questionable.
good job keep up it up
Wow! Great Break Down & Awesome info! I've been wanting a thorough analysis of the #cocainemummies like this for years. Im so glad you did this. I had no idea nicotine could be found in celery 😂 I also had no idea there were species of plant in Africa related to the New World Coco plant that cocaine is made from. I see that Svetlana Balabanova knew about both of these plants from Africa. I don't understand why she didn't mention these plants as a possible source when she 1st announced her discovery? I see it as highly plausible the Egyptians had access to those plants. Possibly from the expidetion to Punt you mentioned our some other possible connections to the Africa inner land deeper south.
Been waiting for this one
Hyerdall was a dealer, no doubt!!!!!! Like all Miano's vidz, really facinating, and grippingly told!!!!!! And have to say, growing pot in Humbolt & Mendocino, we used nicotine based insecticides to kill mites and grape mold (would come from the damn vinyards)
Hey, don't be too down on the vineyards. Some of us like a glass of wine with our toke. 😉
Thanks for this I've often wondered about these mummies and you've answered a lot of my questions.
Your conclusion, Dr Miano, was the first thing on my mind. Contamination is the most likely answer.
Question : cocaine was found in the mummy's stomach. does that mean that (unusually) the stomach was still in place, or just that they also had access to the canopic jars and tested the contents too?
I myself doubt any trans-Atlantic crossings in antiquity but if there were I imagine they may have involved the Canary Islanders. I believe a few of their mummies still exist. Have these been tested for these substances?
But the genetic links...
I guess you don’t know much about sailing
People sail all sorts of crazy places
I think i read somewhere that the Bering Strait was still used for naval crossing after the land bridge was submerged, there's even been genetic exchange between the two sides through time. Thought it was probably just native migrations and it never really "connected" the Americas to the other side of the world like the true trans-atlantic route.
My money is on Polynesians, but I'm also doubtful.
If the Egyptians had coke, the pyramids were probably twice as high.
whether or not anyone from anywhere travelled to the americas (they did) before the age of discovery is meaningless besides being an interesting sidenote of history, because none of them brought anything back either physically or by word of mouth that ever made a difference to the history of any culture anywhere. I really increasingly get annoyed at how much weight people put on this question.
Good video. Thanks
I remember when the news of this first broke & I have seen that documentary you mentioned (I watch a lot of docs about ancient Egypt, Greece & Rome plus follow certain Egyptologists & university lecture series here on YT) My first thought was contamination. My second thought was that it could possibly be plants from the same/similar family as coca/tobacco & have a similar molecular signature thru degradation. I'm not a paleo botanist so I don't even know if that's possible. I've always wondered if this was ever proven/disproven diffinitively or not.
It is also important to remember that cocaine, nicotine, cannabis and opium were common drugs in the 19th century.
If I'm not mistaken, King Ludwig was not averse to these substances. There were a lot of parties at that time where mummies were exhibited, where people smoked (tobacco, cannabis, opium) and probably also did coke and did other occult or perverse things with the mummies. Contamination may well have occurred.
Yes. There was a time when Egyptian artifacts were "all the rage" - while as you alluded to "people of society" often indulged in substances which are today illegal absent a prescription - but which used to be quite ubiquitous in the general population.
Therefore it is a reasonable ask to consider what a mummy might have been exposed to at some point during what was a shifting chain of custody at a time when people did not take precautions to prevent contamination as modern archeologists et al do today.
i’d love to see a video about how vanilla was found in old world tombs
Not a chemist - but maybe from castoreum; a vanilla scented excretion from beaver glands; used as a food additive and incense historically
@@ktiemz i just did some reading and it came vanilla orchids, but there are species of vanilla orchids native to i da, southeast asia, east africa
Trade from the far east existed for ever.
Always very clear, interesting and educational. Thank you. If I may suggest analyzing your hair in this video😂
Thank you for posting this. I've been seeing psuedo-ancient history pages on FB posting this inaccurate history and I get annoyed having to explain that mummies still have "lives" long after their original findings.
How little affect the many CSI TV shows have had on the public ability to understand scientific investigation of such things! Our educational systems seem to be failing us.
@@JMM33RanMA CSI was riddled with inaccuracies and unscientific gobbledegook. They didn't even know how to undo a ziptie without cutting it. They didn't know that iron sulphide does not melt. Just two examples among many.
@@pattheplanter True enough, just like the "medical" shows. I used to have fun pointing out such things. The point was that they present, like the equally flawed exploits of Sherlock Holmes, that analysis and critical thinking are needed to understand and solve problems. What the Red Hats and other Q believers do, is not analysis or critical thinking.
This reminded me of a video by Atunshei about the possibility that the ancient Egyptians (maybe Phoenicians, I cant quite remember) circumnavigated Africa, I think this would make an interesting topic to cover on your channel
Have you had a chance to read David Graeber and David Wengrow's new book "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"? The Notes, Bibliography, and Index combined are about a half-inch thick, the book itself is about an inch and a half thick - so they seem to document their analysis pretty well. I was quite impressed with Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" - well-written and seemingly well-supported.
First time seeing the channel, great video! I can tell you put a lot of work into knowing what you're talking about and presenting it in an open and understandable way. Keep up the good work
Thanks, and welcome!