The archaeologist found a tiny green hand on the skeleton of a child that had somehow been mummified, unlike the rest of the body, which had decayed to bone.
Researchers stumbled upon an unusual mummy hand in a coffin while excavating a cemetery in Nyárlőrinc, a village in southern Hungary. All 500 graves were dug between the 12th and 16th centuries, but a similar phenomenon was found in a single coffin. The very fact that the skeleton turned green is not new to scientists: the dead were often buried with metal decorations or fragments of clothing - and copper and bronze, as you know, oxidize over time and take on a greenish color. The metal coating could have eaten into the bones, but no one knows why it only touched one hand. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Balázs, the author of the study published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, said that "the find is so unusual that you start to question your own judgment."
As expected, during the analysis, archaeologists found the copper content in the bones of the hand - it was incredibly high for a mummy and hundreds of times higher than the average. Having examined the grave, archaeologists found a clay shard and an old copper coin that had turned green from time to time. At present, the working hypothesis remains that according to which the coin was placed in the hand of the dead as a burial gift, and copper, which eventually penetrated into soft tissues, protected them from decay. In this case, this is one of the first (if not the first) cases of involuntary mummification by means of copper in history.
Dr. Berechsky notes that those who buried the child managed to save, if not his soul, then at least some legacy, thanks to which the memory of him lives on many years after the burial.
Vasily Makarov