yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What Lies Beneath London’s Liverpool Rail Station? | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] People are surprised about what lies beneath London, especially when they find human remains. The Liverpool Street Station is one of the most important for archaeology because we're right in the heart of the ancient city here. The cemetery was in use at least 150 years, and during that time, there were at least four recorded outbreaks of Bubonic plague in London, including the Great Plague of 1665, in which perhaps 20% of London's population died in a matter of months.

Certainly, we've got many victims of that particular event here. This cemetery allows us to look at something that hasn't really been looked at before, and that is the DNA of the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis. We can take a tiny sample from a tooth, and now we can compare the DNA with examples of people who died from plague in the last two millennia. It's important for us to understand the evolution of infectious diseases over time, and perhaps also understand how it might change in the future.

We have a database of names of people we know who are buried here. The ultimate goal is to try and connect an individual skeleton to a known biography. Most of the burials are completely anonymous. We've only found half a dozen fragments of small gravestones where the details of the person are kind of etched on. Dying and being buried was a serious financial impact on poorer families in the 16th and 17th century, so this was the cheapest place.

We'll be taking a sample of those skeletons and doing a full comprehensive analysis because whilst we have human remains for the medieval occurrence of the plague and for the late 18th and 19th centuries after it, we have this huge gap in our knowledge that this site will help us to fill. Our job is to look at the bones themselves and record what diseases they had, how healthy they were, what type of injuries they suffered during their lives.

This first skeleton was an adult female who, at the time of death, was suffering from venereal syphilis. This was an adult male; he suffered a severe blow to the head, resulting in blunt force trauma. It's very important that we take time to study our past, whether it's in documents or whether it is in the ground, because the more we know about our past, the more we know who we are, the more we can understand about our future.

More Articles

View All
Acid–base indicators | Acids and bases | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Acid-base indicators are used in titrations to determine when the equivalence point is reached. Let’s look at a hypothetical indicator. In the protonated form, the indicator has the formula H-I-N. So this would be the acidic proton on this protonated form…
How to Build a One-Person Business in 2025 (In 12 Months or Less)
This year I made over 360k US from this YouTube channel without having any full-time employees, and in this video I’m going to show you how I would do that exactly, step by step, in the next 12 months so that you can copy my framework in 2025. But be care…
Great White Sharks of Guadalupe Island | Most Wanted Sharks
NARRATOR: But everyone loves Lucy. The story of this great white is the classic “Finding Nemo” tale, but about 2,000 pounds heavier. When divers spotted Lucy back in 2008, her distinctive tail wound looked fresh. And she seemed in desperate need of a good…
Sunni and Shia Islam part 1 | World History | Khan Academy
We’re now going to talk about the main division that emerges in Islam shortly after the death of Muhammad, and that division is between Sunnis and Shias. This division even exists today, where roughly 90% of the world’s 1.5 or 1.6 billion Muslims are Sunn…
Bubbling Disaster | Science of Stupid
Cracking open a bottle of bubbly isn’t just for F1 drivers and stock brokers; it’s also the perfect way to kick off a Christmas party. But like F1 drivers and stock brokers, champagne bottles are under an awful lot of pressure—around six times normal atmo…
Debugging with stack traces | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy
Debugging is just a fancy term for fixing errors in programs. It’s the process of removing bugs, so we call it “debug” since it’s something we’ll be doing often. Let’s learn how to work together with our IDE to track down and fix bugs in our programs. He…