It must be a real work effort to come up with these crazy headlines. They compete for attention in a scrolling war. These are the two that got my attention on Bing today.
We may know some of the rare body features - they have come up before: Elizabeth Taylor's double row of eyelashes. That condition is called Distichiasis. What about tetrachromacy where a person has a fourth cone cell to identify colour and allows for more colours to be seen than in normal trichromatic. There are people with an extra rib near the neck. Five percent of people have an extra hole near the ear and is considered proof that once all living things had gills. And those people who sleep less and work more like Margret Thatcher and Winston Churchill had the DEC2 gene. It allows them to go through a sleep cycle in less time than most of us.
In the opposite ring is the headline on non-human mummies. This isn't news. There are thousands of mummified cats in tombs. They have found lizards, birds, crocodiles and fish.
What about the mummified foetus of a male child between 22 and 28 weeks. It had a rare birth defect so the skull was deformed and the brain almost non-existent. It would have been a stillborn birth, and the child mummified. Only one of six or eight of these have been found.
But the number of mummies overall is large. A child-looking mummy turned out to be made of plant matter, and was meant to represent Osiris, the lord of the underworld and god of the dead. Grain mummies have been found before.
Do you know how many mummies have been found in Egypt. It is estimated that 70 million mummies were made in Egypt over the 3,000 years of their civilization. These are of all sorts - human and animal.
How many human mummies? The number is 45 when it comes to Pharaohs. There are many more of common people in graveyards. More than 1,700 mummies were unearthed at one site and the estimate is a million similar bodies buried in shafts cut into the limestone rock.
So my vote goes to the Egyptian Mummies. This is a mysterious and interesting story in our distant past.
