How Scientists Are Solving History’s Riddles
Joe Nickell calls them “time capsules,” these rare opportunities to explore the mysteries of the past. He is a sleuth of history, a man who uses everything from a knowledge of ancient inks to carbon dating to tackle the questions of long-ago events.
Nickell, who has written a book about historical mysteries, once put together a research team that concluded that a diary purportedly penned by Jack the Ripper was bogus. He’s come down on the side of research that believes the Shroud of Turin is a 13th century fake. And his sleuthing led him to posit that 19th century satirist Ambrose Bierce wasn’t killed in the Mexican Civil War, but actually committed suicide.
“The whole concept is applying modern concepts to mysteries,” said Nickell, who also investigates the occult and claims of miracles for the nonprofit Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in Amherst, N.Y.
Applying modern methods to the past is a growth industry. More and more, science and technology are being used to answer, in some cases centuries-old, questions. The latest of these efforts is an attempt by the National Archives to restore the infamous 181/2-minute erasure on the Watergate tapes. Such an effort would have been futile in 1972, when the tape was erased. But with the advances in technology, experts now believe it’s at least worth a shot.
And, said sound expert Peter St. Croix, even if the effort proves futile this time around, technology is advancing at such a pace that success could easily be the next breakthrough away. “Compared to what will be possible, we’ve done nothing,” said the Baltimore-based St. Croix, who served on the National Archives advisory board that decided to attempt the restoration. “We’re just coming off the starting line.”
In the 29 years since the tapes were erased, the advances of science have completely changed the rules in the world of historical mysteries. The unknowable has become knowable.
The Titanic has been found, as have the lost cities of Herakleion off the coast of Egypt and Ubar in the Arabian Desert. With DNA testing, the myth that Anastasia Romonov survived the massacre of her family by the Bolsheviks has been put to rest. So, too, has the long-standing hoax by the pretender Anna Anderson, who claimed that she was, in fact, Anastasia.
Researchers last month revealed that X-rays proved the famous Italian Iceman, the Bronze Age’s best-preserved mummy, was killed with an arrow. Carbon dating has given scientists his age and microscopic analysis has shown that he ate meat, unleavened bread and a herb or green plant for his last meal.
Tests have shown that Jesse James is buried in Jesse James’ grave, thereby debunking the myth that the outlaw faked his death. DNA tests on a body exhumed from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1998 led to a positive identification, giving his family peace of mind after almost 30 years of uncertainty.
In one of the longest-running disputes of American history, another 1998 DNA test bolstered evidence that Thomas Jefferson sired at least one illegitimate child by his slave housekeeper, Sally Hemings.
True enough, these discoveries don’t tell the whole story. The recent raising of the Civil War submarine Hunley, for instance, doesn’t give up the secret of what went on in those final minutes before it sank into its sandy grave near Charleston, S.C. But it should unlock the 137-year-old question of why it sank.
So what’s the latest possibility? It could be finding parts of Amelia Earhart’s plane. A Maryland company thinks it’s compiled enough data to start the search.
In the years since Watergate, several factors have converged to help unearth long-held and other mysteries. The first, and most prominent, is DNA testing, perhaps the most important forensic advance since the advent of fingerprinting in the early 1900s. The tool, which has been steadily refined since testing began in the mid-1980s, can now positively identify anyone, excepting identical twins, using nothing more than a speck of blood or a strand of hair.
Joining the string of DNA successes last year was proof that the last dauphin, 10-year-old Louis Charles of France, did die in prison in 1795 and was not spirited to safety, as some believed. DNA from his mummified heart matched the DNA from the hair of his mother, Marie Antoinette.
On a less flashy but more important note, DNA has been used in recent years to prove the innocence of a number of wrongfully-convicted prisoners throughout the United States.
Undersea Technology Has Made Advances
A second factor in solving these historic mysteries is the development of satellite positioning and undersea technology that has revolutionized mapping and oceangoing treasure hunting.
Finally, there have been phenomenal strides in the computer, which have opened avenues of discovery that would otherwise have been closed.
“It’s added in one’s ability to process data,” said Ronald Blom, a geologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been instrumental in using the computer to help unearth antiquities.
“With the increase in computer power, you can run data that you wouldn’t have been able to before.”
It is the computer, for instance, that has narrowed the search for Amelia Earhart. Last spring, Nauticos, the Maryland-based marine exploration company, announced it would attempt to solve one of the great mysteries of the 20th century--the 1937 disappearance of the aviatrix in the South Pacific as she was attempting to circle the globe with her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Nauticos is not the only one looking for Earhart, but the company is convinced it has computed all the variables of the crash and narrowed the search area to less than 500 square miles off uninhabited Howland Island, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Included in those computations are detailed analyses of weather, radio waves and fuel consumption.
“With that information and some other parameters, we think we have narrowed it down to a small enough area so it can be searched with a high likelihood of success,” said David Jourdan, the company president.
Another company dealing with undersea salvage is the Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, which also has had success in finding sunken ships. The company’s co-founder, Greg Stemm, said technological advances have created opportunities that would have been unheard of 20 years ago. He said back then, deep-sea salvagers depended on slow, underpowered manned submersibles to do the recovery work, whereas today the primary tool is the “remotely operated vehicle.”
“Ten years ago we considered ourselves lucky to be able to search five square miles and the results were usually poor-quality images,” Stemm said. “Today, we can search as much as 60 square miles per day.”
Stemm described the world’s sunken ships as “the greatest museum in the world” with artifacts dating to the earliest civilizations. “Today, technology is advancing so rapidly that we are quickly uncovering the mantle that has hidden these shipwrecks for so long,” he said.
Solving Land-Based Mysteries as Well
That technology, however, is not limited to looking for treasure buried under the sea. One of the best examples of the Space Age helping solve land-based mysteries is the 1992 discovery of the incense trading mecca of Ubar in the heart of the Arabian Empty Quarter.
The ancient city, mentioned in the Koran and “The Thousand and One Nights,” was said to have been destroyed by Allah, the Muslim name for God, a thousand years ago to punish the people for their sins.
It also became an obsession of Nicholas Clapp, a Los Angeles documentary filmmaker who spent years researching the subject before finally concluding that Ubar might actually have existed. The trouble was finding ancient trade routes that would lead them to the city. Clapp turned to JPL’s Blom, who was intrigued with the idea of trying to capture satellite images of ancient camel tracks while eliminating those from more modern times.
“So, Ron devised a program where he was able to reprocess the image and eliminate all the modern tracks and keep just the old ones,” Clapp said. “It looked quite psychedelic.”
In the end, using the satellite imaging and a global positioning system, the party drove to a spot in the Empty Quarter where the ancient tracks converged. What they found at first was a vast expanse of sand. “We knew we were standing on it, but there was nothing to be seen,” Clapp said. It was only after they began to dig that they realized they had found the remains of the city.
Clapp likens the Watergate tapes to Ubar--invisible at first but still there, waiting to be unearthed.
For Nickell, the historical sleuth, the Dead Sea Scrolls remind him of the tapes. The scrolls, found in 1947 in the Judean wilderness, are the ancient remains of 800 Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. The scrolls contain the oldest copies of nearly all the books in Hebrew scripture and are considered one of the great historical finds of the century.
“Many were seriously darkened with age and were for all intents and purposes unreadable,” Nickell said. “But infrared photography penetrated the stain.”
Nickell pointed to other methods used in the solving of historical mysteries: automated fingerprint identification systems that provide computer matches in seconds; tests that can date ancient artifacts to separate the real from the fake; methods of penetrating the top layer of a painting to see what lies beneath it.
But Nickell said there are mysteries that probably won’t be solved. One of his examples is Jack the Ripper, London’s most spectacular murderer, who panicked the city with a rampage of throat-slicing in 1888. Though variously described as a doctor, a midwife, a butcher, an insane professor and a Russian barber-surgeon, he--or she--disappeared and left no clues that would shed light on identity.
“We don’t have the time capsule--nothing that could be subjected to modern testing,” he said.
