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
Accelerate Your Career With These 15 Unbeatable Skills
What if we told you that how far you climb up the corporate ladder has nothing to do with your competency? Your boss proves it. And although you can’t fake your way all the way to the top, the majority of competent people get stuck much lower in the hiera…
The Genderbread Person | Gender Revolution
KATIE COURIC: Let’s unpack this whole gender conversation. You use a device, or a character, called the Genderbread Man. SAM KILLERMAN: Person. KATIE COURIC: Oh, sorry. Oh. Sorry, sorry. The Genderbread Person. SAM KILLERMAN: It’s OK. I find it really …
The first time I had full control of a plane!
First time I had full control of the plane by myself and the instructor wasn’t with me, I was like, “Holy… I mean, what do I do now?” I took off, and that we’ve done it so many times, but it’s so different when the instructor’s sitting there next to you. …
The Ebola Outbreak of 1976 | Going Viral
NARRATOR: In 1976, a deadly illness erupted in a remote province of Zaire. [music playing] Belgian nuns tending to the sick described horrific symptoms followed by agonizing deaths. REID WILSON: It attacks tissue around the body. It basically attacks eve…
Worked example: Continuity at a point | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We have the graph of y is equal to g of x right over here. What I want to do is check which of these statements are actually true and then check them off. Like always, I encourage you to pause the video and see if you can work through this on your own. L…
How to Learn Faster with the Feynman Technique (Example Included)
There’s this pretty well known quote that gets thrown around a lot, and it’s often attributed to Albert Einstein, and it goes, “Now whether or not Einstein was the person who actually said this, let’s be real he probably wasn’t.” It’s still really insight…