Neanderthal Man by Svante Pbo Read Free Book Online

seen what seemed to be remains of cells in some mummies? Perhaps that brown stuff was actually DNA, chemically modified in some way so as to look brown and fluoresce blue in UV light. Perhaps it was naïve to expect DNA to survive in every mummy. Perhaps one needed to analyze many mummies to find the rare good ones. The only way to find out was to convince museum curators to sacrifice pieces of many mummies in the perhaps vain hope that one of them would produce ancient DNA, and I had little idea how to get their permission. It seemed I needed a quick and minimally destructive way to analyze a lot of mummies. My medical education gave me a clue. Very small pieces of tissue, such as those removed with a biopsy needle from a suspected tumor, for example, could be fixed and stained and then studied under a microscope. The level of discernible detail was generally exquisite, allowing a trained pathologist to distinguish normal cells in the lining of the intestine or in a prostate or mammary gland, on the one hand, from cells that had started to change in ways that suggested they were early tumors, on the other. Moreover, there were dyes specific for DNA that could be applied to microscope slides to show whether DNA was present. What I needed to do was to collect small samples from a large number of mummies and analyze them by microscopy and DNA staining. The largest numbers of mummies, obviously, were to be found in the largest museums. But the curators could be expected to be skeptical about letting a slightly overexcited student from Sweden remove even tiny pieces for what seemed a pie-in-the-sky project.
    Again, Rosti proved sympathetic; he pointed out that there was one large museum that had huge mummy collections and might be willing to cooperate. It was the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, a complex of museums in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic. Rosti had spent many weeks there working on its ancient Egyptian pottery collection. That Rosti came to East Germany as a professor from Sweden, which at the time was perceived as a country that attempted to find a “third way” between capitalism and communism, probably helped him gain permission  to work in the museum. But it was his ability to develop warm friendships across borders that then allowed him to become close friends with several of the curators at the museum. And thus, in the summer of 1983, I found myself on a train that was driven onto a ferry in southern Sweden to arrive the next morning in communist East Germany.
    I spent two weeks in Berlin. Every morning I had to pass several security controls to enter the storage facility of the Bode Museum, located on an island in the River Spree near the heart of Berlin. Almost forty years after the war, the museum was still clearly marked by it. On several of the facades, I could see bullet holes in the walls around the windows that had been targeted by machine guns as Berlin fell to the Soviet Army. On the first day, when I was taken to see the prewar Egyptological exhibition, I was handed a hard hat like the ones used by construction workers. It soon became clear why. The exhibition hall had huge holes in the roof from artillery shelling and bombs. Birds were flying in and out, and some were nesting in the pharaonic sarcophagi. Everything that was not of durable material was now sensibly stored elsewhere.
    Over the following days, the curator in charge of Egyptian antiquities showed me all his mummies. For a few hours before lunch in his dusty run-down office I removed small snippets of tissues from mummies that were unwrapped and broken. Lunch was a long affair that required exiting through all the security checks to reach a restaurant across the river, where we ate greasy food that needed lubrication with copious amounts of beer and schnapps. Back in the collections, we spent the afternoon over more schnapps, lamenting the fact that the only foreign travel the curator had ever been allowed was