Ashes to ashes.
Dust to dust.
Death always gets the final word - no matter how we mock it.
Sworn to eternal silence, the Dead seem beyond our reach.
Yet to some scientists, they speak volumes.
"When I look at a mummy, I'm looking at an encyclopedia."
Through the lens of modern science,
the grave has become a window on the past.
Today we can learn intimate details
about how the Ancients lived- and how they died.
"...that's really, that's, that's really a common way that they did it -
the strangulation or blows to the head..."
Bit by bit, their portraits emerge from flesh, bone, and DNA.
"Bringing the people back to life, I think that that's the fun part of it."
The unearthing of the past reveals the tangled roots of our family tree.
But some see only the desecration of their ancestors.
"They must be put back into the bosom of sacred Mother Earth."
As the Living defend the Dead, battle lines are drawn.
In truth, those who passed here long ago still dwell among us.
From fragile remains, their life stories unfold.
And as we hear them, they become a part of us all.
Listen now to the voices of the Dead.
This is the driest place on earth: The Atacama Desert in Chile.
Life has found a foothold here: Not in the blazing sands,
but in the slender river valleys
that stretch across the desert from the Andes to the sea.
The city of Arica stands where two rivers meet the Pacific Ocean.
Countless generations of fishermen have thrived here,
and many families have deep roots.
Whenever ground is broken,
there's a good chance these roots may come to light.
The city's arid soil has yielded several ancient burials,
to the delight of scientists from the local university.
But physical anthropologist Bernardo Arriaza,
now with the University of Nevada, will never forget a visit
to a site where the water company was digging trenches.
I remembered in 1983, it was a quiet day
when the water company called us.
They said they had found something unusual,
so that really caught our interest.
"And we get called all the time,
and you never know what you're going to find,
so that's also the exciting part of going.
You don't know what it's going to be.
And this time it was quite incredible, actually."
The shovels had exposed a plot of nearly a hundred mummies.
Some would be dated to 7,000 years ago-
2,000 years older than the mummies of ancient Egypt.
Eerie masks were sculpted over their faces.
Wigs were glued directly to their skulls.
Bodies were completely made over-
paste and paint on the outside, grasses and earth within.
Men, women and children were mummified.
Even this eight inch long fetus.
These elaborate mummies were created by a people called the Chinchorro.
They lived along the coast in simple huts,
and left little behind- no monuments, no written texts.
But from their bones and artifacts,
Arriaza has compiled a profile of their lifestyle.
"The Chinchorro people were fishermen.
They fished from the rocks with fish hooks made of shells.
They also collected shellfish and hunted sea lions with harpoons.
And they wove beautiful nets to gather their food.
Their clothing and ornaments were minimal.
All their emphasis went into mummifying the dead"
Why would a simple people transform their dead
into such elaborate creations?
Arriaza has a theory.
"Someone is being mummified,
it's a lot of energy investment, it's a lot of caring.
Even the fetuses are fascinating.
Why? Because they have long hair, they have the mouth open.
That's conveying life.
"We tend to see our dead as someone that's farther away.
We don't want to see the dead with open eyes-
no, you think, wow, that would scare me.
You want to see the dead completely dead.
In the case of the Chinchorro,
they're seeing the dead as part of the living."
Virtual works of art, their mummies were not intended for the grave.
They played an important role in the very heart of the community.
The mummy was an honored emissary who moved between this world and the next-
sending word to the ancestors, interceding before the gods.
The people rendered thanks with songs and offerings.
Mummification helped ease the loss of a loved one,
and strengthened bonds between the living.
It made the community whole again.
Such rituals may have quelled the awful fear of what lies beyond death-
no less a mystery 7,000 years ago than today.
One of the earliest expressions of the human spirit,
death rites date back at least 100,000 years.
Even the Neandertals buried one of their own
beneath a blanket of flowers.
Every culture on earth has evolved rituals
to bid a final farewell to the dead.
Some consign the body to the embrace of the earth.
Others ensure the release of the soul through fire.
In today's crowded world,
the practice of cremation is on the rise wherever land is at a premium.
We even send our dead into space.
For about the cost of a terrestrial burial,
a company in Texas will load a container of ashes on a small rocket.
After orbiting for several years,
the ashes eventually fall into Earth's atmosphere and vaporize,
like a tiny shooting star.
It's a fitting twenty- first century sendoff...
but would have been unthinkable
in one of the greatest civilizations the Earth has ever known.
The ancient Egyptians believed the body had to last forever.
Without it, the deceased could not rise again
in the next world to enjoy eternal life.
To prevent decay, the bodies of the dead were drained of moisture,
and reduced to the consistency of leather.
Everyone wanted to be mummified.
There may have been cut-rate embalming for the poor,
first-lass treatment for the rich.
Even animals were mummified,
to accompany the dead on their final journey.
Over some thirty centuries, countless mummies were made.
But countless were also destroyed.
Almost from the moment they were sealed,
the Pyramids and nearly every other well-
appointed tomb were ransacked by thieves.
Kings or commoners, bodies were hacked apart and left in tatters.
Things got worse when Europe developed a taste for mummies.
By the 12th century,
they were imported by the ton to be ground up and mixed
in potions purported to cure everything from headaches to impotence.
In 1798, Napoleon's campaign spawned a new wave of "mummy-mania."
Over the next century, hundreds were dissected
both in laboratories and at fashionable unwrapping parties.
The supply seemed endless.
Mummies made cheap fertilizer and fuel.
In the 19th century, trains from Cairo burned stacks of them
to power their steam boilers.
Our fascination with mummies continued unabashed well into the 20th century.
"Is it dead or alive? Human or inhuman?
You'll know. You'll see.
You'll feel the awful, creeping crawling terror
that stands your hair on end and brings a scream to you lips!!!
The Mummy!!"
Today, Egypt's mummies are treated as fragile time capsules.
Science now has the tools to explore their secrets without destroying them.
"Take this side off right here."
Researchers can coax clues about daily life 3,000 years ago
from the tiniest samples of tissue and bone.
Egyptologist Bob Brier,
of Long Island University, knows more than most about mummies.
But just how a mummy became a mummy was a question that irked him for years.
"The party line among Egyptologists was always,
'Oh we know how they did it, they removed the brain through the nose,
they removed the internal organs.
We know pretty much how they did it.'
But there's no papyrus that tells how to mummify a human.
The Egyptians never wrote down how they did it.
It was a secret, probably a trade secret."
A brief description was recorded by Greek historian Herodotus around 450BC.
For Brier, it was not the final word.
I started to do a mental mummification,
trying to just imagine exactly what happened.
At some point I realized,
the only way we'll ever really find out is to do it."
In 1994, Brier set about to perform the first Egyptian-
style mummification in two thousand years.
In Cairo, he tracked down the embalming spices
mentioned by Herodotus, including frankincense and myrrh.
He would also need special equipment.
"We had to have replica tools
made of all the instruments we thought the embalmers used.
So for example, we had to have obsidian,
an obsidian blade flaked by somebody in the Southwest
who knew how to do this.
We had to have a silversmith make bronze tools
just like ancient Egyptian bronze tools."
"Not since the time of Sneferu has its like been done.
Now I'm a little bigger than the average Egyptian..."
Copying ancient designs, Brier built an embalming board
for the elevation of the corpse and drainage of fluids.
"And I'll tell you, it might be good for the dead,
but it's not good for the living."
With his colleague Ronald Wade, at the University of Maryland Medical School,
Brier would mummify a man who had donated his remains to science.
"There were quite a few surprises
along the way as we did the mummification.
One was in removing the brain.
Everybody always thought that
you kind of pull the brain out a piece at a time through the nose,
at least that's how all the articles say it was done.
We tried it, it didn't come out that way."
"What we figured out, what the Ancient Egyptians did was
they inserted a long hook and then moved it around,
using it like a whisk.
And then broke down the brain until-
it was almost like a, a milk shake consistency,
and then turned the cadaver upside down, and then the brain ran out.
That's how they did it."
Internal organs were removed through an incision made with an obsidian blade -
sharp as any modern scalpel.
Then the body was covered with several hundred of pounds of natron -
a naturally occurring salt, Brier had imported from Egypt.
Internal organs were treated separately.
Left in place for about a month,
the natron was supposed to leach all moisture from the body.
For Brier, the suspense was overwhelming.
"What would we get? Would it look like a mummy?
Or would it need another 3,000 years
before it looked like the things in the museums?"
"One of the things that was really almost shocking
was when we took the natron off, we had a mummy."
A striking demonstration that people are mostly water,
the body would shrink from more than 160 pounds, to just 45.
"What are the oils in it, Bob?"
"The oils are frankincense, myrrh oil, palm oil, lotus oil, and cedar oil.
There are five that I got."
Brier anointed the body with oils considered sacred by the Egyptians,
then began wrapping.
"Nice and tight."
Accurate to the last detail,
he used more than a hundred yards of pure linen
inscribed with Egyptian spells.
Internal organs were placed in replica funerary jars,
created by local college students.
"It's been perfumed and now it's going to be wrapped
and we place it inside the jar."
"A lot of people don't realize that we did the project
not to get the mummy, but to get knowledge.
And the project isn't over.
Our mummy, it seems,
is what we say, dead and well.
He's been at room temperature now for about two years,
no signs of decay, it's stable.
So we think we did it right.
But he's still being used in research projects around the world.
We get requests for tissue samples,
from people doing studies on ancient Egyptian mummies.
This is the only mummy in the world
for which we know exactly what was done to him.
It's the only, so to speak,
ancient Egyptian mummy that we have a full medical record on.
So it's an important mummy."
If only in the annals of science, Brier's mummy has achieved immortality-
a fate the Egyptians would surely have approved.
The quest for eternal life still goes on today-
just in a different form.
Cryonics involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen
immediately fter death.
Practitioners have faith that scientists of the future
will have the know-how to revive them.
The sad truth is the human body- about two thirds water,
plus a few basic chemicals- is simply not built to last.
Exposed in warm weather,
a corpse could be reduced to a skeleton in a matter of weeks.
Underground, or underwater, the process usually takes somewhat longer.
Bone may last from months to millennia.
But when conditions are just right, Nature makes mummies.
In northwest China, near the route of the fabled Silk Road,
the searing sands have yielded
more than a hundred heat- dried mummies.
Surprisingly, they have the features of Caucasians,
and date back two to four thousand years.
Many must have lived in the region centuries
before the opening of the Silk Road around 200 BC.
Scholars had long been puzzled by ancient Chinese texts
describing figures of great height, with red or yellow hair.
Cave paintings in the region lent credence to the accounts,
but the discovery of the mummies adds an important piece to the puzzle.
Their existence suggests foreign traders settled in China
much earlier than previously believed.
The bogs of northern Europe have long inspired legends-
among them the "boogie-man."
Two thousand years ago, the Celts and their kin believed bogs
were an entrance to the realm of the gods.
They tossed in tribute of silver and gold-
and other strange sacrifices.
Bogs are filled with a natural "embalming fluid",
acidic water low in oxygen and rich with tannins,
the same chemicals used to cure leather.
Over time, this brew converts dead vegetation into peat,
long harvested as a heating fuel.
It also works wonders on bodies.
More than a thousand "bog mummies" have come to light;
most are some 2,000 years old.
Often, their bones are dissolved, while their skin is transformed
into a supple leather that retains a breathtaking impression of life.
Many bog mummies bear signs of a violent death-
slit throat, strangulation, or hanging.
Many scholars believe they were sacrificed to fertility gods
by early farming communities.
They were plunged into the bog, so the wheat would rise again.
More than 2,500 years ago, the Altai mountains of Siberia
were home to a nomadic people called the Pazyryk.
They lived by the horse,
and moved great herds across the land in search of pasture.
Horses were their measure of wealth and status.
The Pazyryk buried their dead in chambers dug deep into the icy earth.
In 1993, Russian archaeologists opened an undisturbed chamber.
First, they found the remains of six horses killed by blows to the head.
Surely, they thought, this must be the tomb of a powerful man.
The coffin itself was completely sealed in ice.
To everyone's surprise, it contained a young woman-
her features gone, but her body intact.
Tattoos of mythical creatures adorned her sturdy hands.
Was she a Priestess? Warrior? Healer?
Her identity eludes us,
but she provides a new image of women in this ancient culture.
On the west coast of Greenland,
a rocky cove once harbored an Eskimo village,
home to a people called the Inuit.
Some five hundred years ago, misfortune struck here,
and eight bodies were laid to rest in a dry, sheltering cave.
Cause of death remains a mystery.
But these freeze? Dried mummies, in superb fur clothing,
rank as one of the most spectacular archaeological finds
from the arctic region.
The frozen heights of the Andes preserve a record of the past.
Five hundred years ago, the Inca ruled these highlands,
and worshiped the mountains as gods.
Traces of their sacred sites are scattered throughout the peaks.
For nearly two decades, anthropologist Johan Reinhard
has sought out the high altitude sites of the Inca.
But in September 1995, he first climbed Mount Ampato in Peru
with a different goal in mind.
"Ampato's been a peak that's always been a mystery.
It's always stood out there and people haven't really climbed it very often
and haven't seen much that's been on it."
"And the idea was just to get some pictures of another volcano
that was erupting nearby,
never really thinking we'd find anything on the summit.
Now the reason for that is is that it's never been seen
without a permanent snow-capped summit."
The eruption had showered Ampato with dark ash.
Even at more than 20,000 feet, much of the snow had melted.
When my assistant, Miguel Zarate, and I, we reached the summit,
I was taking some notes when Miguel just continued on and,
all of a sudden, gave a whistle and pointed.
And I looked and, sure enough, it was clear from even, forty, fifty feet away,
that there were feathers sticking out of the slope."
They adorned three Inca figurines once buried, now exposed by a rockslide.
"We were still looking down the slope
and very quickly saw this bundle, laying right out on the ice.
I asked Miguel to pick it up and move it a bit.
And as he did, all of a sudden
we were looking into the face of this dead young woman."
Mummified by the cold, she had been sacrificed and buried
on the mountaintop some five hundred years ago.
When her rocky tomb collapsed, her face was exposed to the sun.
But her body was intact-skin, muscle, bone,
even the blood in her veins frozen solid.
Scientists estimate she was twelve to fourteen years old when she died.
Never before had the richly patterned clothing
of an Inca noble woman come to light.
She is probably the best-preserved mummy
ever discovered in the Americas.
In May 1996, the Maiden is flown, still frozen,
to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
A state-of-the-art CAT scanner
produces a detailed three-dimensional image of her body.
Her strong bones and teeth, well-formed muscles and internal organs
speak volumes about Inca nutrition and health.
It's a stunning sight for the man who carried her down the mountain.
Then Johan Reinhard learns the secret of the Maiden's death.
A fatal two-inch fracture mars her skull.
"You can see it pretty nicely just rotating it around but, uh,
would it, would it make sense that she may have been hit by a blow?"
"Absolutely, that's, that's really a common way that they did it-
the strangulation and blows to the heads
were, were common ways to do human sacrifice.
We just didn't see it."
"I kept having visions of what it was like carrying her in the dark,
with the volcano and snowfall and everything.
And seeing this modern machinery
and you could look at the screen and view bones and even organs.
It was just amazing, she just began to come alive."
To the Inca, human sacrifice was the ultimate offering,
an act of gratitude when the gods were generous;
a desperate plea when they were angry.
Archaeologists now know the Ampato Maiden died
during a long-term volcanic eruption.
The cataclysm could have had devastating effects on the region.
Daily showers of hot ash.
Air thick with smoke.
Water sources poisoned.
Crops and livestock decimated.
A circle of priests would have led the Maiden
to the highest reaches of Mount Ampato.
It was a grueling climb that took days.
She alone shouldered the fate of her family and her people.
To be thus chosen was a great honor.
In exchange for her life, she would earn an eternity of bliss
and a place among the gods.
Soon after she died, the eruption spent itself,
and the snows returned to Ampato,
sealing the Maiden in ice for the next five centuries.
Even now, she serves her people well.
"She's providing us with so much information,
that I hope that we are giving back something to her
by deepening our respect
and understanding for the culture that she came from,
and the Inca civilization five hundred years ago."
Across the globe, another chain of snowy peaks
yields a messenger from the past.
The Alps seem impenetrable from the air.
But for millennia, shepherds and traders
have hiked their mountain passes.
Today's trekkers are mostly tourists.
Every year, millions enjoy the alpine splendors of southern Austria.
In the fall of 1991, unusual weather turns snow to slush.
On September 19th,
a couple of hikers stray from a marked trail, hoping to find a shortcut.
Instead, in a melting glacier at more than 10,000 feet,
they spot something that stops them in their tracks.
Four days later, delayed by bad weather,
an Austrian forensic team arrives.
This is not an uncommon sight in the Alps.
The frozen bodies of mountaineers are sometimes found decades
after they perish among the peaks.
But this body is so deeply icebound the team borrows an ice axe
and ski pole from a passing hiker.
Somewhat puzzling are the scraps of leather
pulled from the slush around the body.
Not to mention the strange artifacts.
Team members conclude this body has been frozen a very long time.
They turn it over to experts at the University of Innsbruck.
Still wearing a strange shoe stuffed with grass,
it's the body of a 25 to 40 year old man,
shriveled but virtually intact.
Teeth show heavy wear.
Simple blue tattoos adorn his lower back and legs.
Seventy objects were found near his body.
A quiver of animal skin containing fourteen arrows.
A leather waist pouch, not unlike a "fanny pack."
Bits of leather and grass rope.
A flint dagger.
Most telling, an axe with an exquisite copper blade.
To archaeologists, the design of the blade
suggests its owner may have died 4,000 years ago.
It was not the final word.
Skin, bone and grass samples
are sent to four eminent European laboratories for radiocarbon dating.
All four conclude the Iceman died about 5,300 years ago-
which makes him the oldest frozen mummy ever found.
Almost immediately, word gets out.
The University of Innsbruck is overrun,
and a humble man from the Copper Age becomes an overnight sensation.
Few archaeological discoveries have so completely dominated the headlines.
Nicknamed after the Otztal Alps,
"Otzi" provides endless inspiration to local entrepreneurs.
Who was he? How did he die?
We may never know.
But his body and artifacts have begun to yield glimpses
of a lifestyle practiced more than 5,000 years ago.
X-rays speak of lifelong physical stress:
Broken ribs, heavily worn joints, arthritis.
In his left foot
With an endoscope,
scientists remove a sample from the Iceman's stomach
and found remnants of meat and grain- his last meal.
His lungs made a startling sight, blackened
by hours spent near open fires, in close, smoky quarters.
Clinging to tatters of the Iceman's fur clothing,
grains of primitive wheat suggest
he had passed through a farming community near harvest time.
Found frozen in the snow near his body,
a sloe berry also helped pinpoint the season of his death:
The fruit ripens in early autumn.
At the discovery site, now determined to be inside the Italian border,
researchers sifted through six hundred tons of snow.
After days of melting and filtering,
they recovered part of a plaited grass cloak.
Another fragment, the upper edge of the cloak,
held hairs that fell from the Iceman's head after death.
Chemical analysis would show the hair was heavily coated with copper particles
the kind that are airborne near the smelting of copper ore.
Not an unusual finding- if the Iceman was a coppersmith,
or an assistant to one.
Finally, every last inch of the Iceman's body
became digital information, in a three? Dimensional CAT scan.
This "virtual Iceman" allows for unlimited study
without risking the fragile, frozen remains.
It also provides a ghostly foundation for a skilled artist,
as he resurrects a traveler from a distant time.
Something drives him to the heights-trade or duty.
He may be a renegade on the run.
He knows the mountains well, but fails to heed the warning signs.
Perhaps he has no choice but to press on.
He climbs higher than the trees,
beyond hope of any kindling to build a fire against the terrible cold.
In the lee of a rocky ridge,
he'll lay down his belongings and wait out the night.
He knows that with sleep comes certain death.
But his senses are already numbed.
His lonely death deprived him of funeral rites by his people.
But this everyday man, frozen in time on his way somewhere,
has helped write a new chapter on daily life in prehistoric Europe.
In southwest England,
Somerset is a region of limestone cliffs and deep gorges.
Home to some 3,000 people, the town of Cheddar is known
not just for its namesake cheese,
but for a series of spectacular caves sculpted by an underground river.
Some 9,000 years ago, Ice Age hunters camped here,
and left one of their dead in the damp darkness.
Today a replica of "Cheddar Man" marks the spot.
He lived before the age of farming, when bears and wolves roamed the land.
The oldest complete skeleton found in England,
it seems Cheddar Man died of head injuries around age 40.
In 1996, a fragment from his tooth was analyzed
by scientists at Oxford University.
The ancient bone yielded traces of DNA.
A tiny fraction of Cheddar Man's genetic fingerprint was revealed.
A local television producer decided to test whether
any of Cheddar Man's descendants were still living in the area today.
The high school became involved in his experiment.
Students from local families were asked to donate DNA samples.
Why are those two unpopular and who are they unpopular with?
History teacher Adrian Targett,
himself a native of the Somerset region,
helped coordinate the volunteers.
A simple cheek swab was all it took
to collect the necessary cells for DNA analysis.
To make up an even twenty, Targett donated a sample, too.
At Oxford University, the DNA was parsed and sorted.
Within weeks, results were in.
"On the basis of what we've got here, that would be an identical match
which would mean that they had a common maternal ancestor.
So, who do we match this up with? Let's see..."
"Number 12."
"Number 12, so who's number 12?"
On a Friday afternoon, the volunteers were assembled to hear the news.
"You're all agog, no doubt, to know who it is?
Who is related to the cave man found in Cheddar? Yes?
What would it feel like if it was one of you?
Because it's probably going to be of interest to people
all over the world that there is a link, over 9,000 years,
to this person found in the cave.
Think you could stand the publicity and visits to California and wherever?
Yes? So, who is it? It's Adrian Targett!"
"Thank you very much!"
"This is the man that's closest related to Cheddar Man."
"I'm overwhelmed!"
"How do you feel about that?"
"A bit surprised! I was just about, about to say, 'I hope it's not me!"'
"Adrian, what was your instant reaction when you were told that
you had this amazing line back 9,000 years to a caveman?"
"Well, it was a great shock, but then I realized
that was why I had been put in next to the person who was doing the filming."
The study of "dead DNA"? Is becoming a powerful tool
for unraveling relationships long buried in the past.
It can help illuminate patterns of gene flow between ancient populations,
or family ties among rulers in a bygone dynasty.
DNA gave this man the oldest documented pedigree in the world.
But there's more to it for Adrian Targett.
It's essentially about our roots and connections and families,
and I think, at heart, most people want to know more about themselves,
where they come from, and of course this story does just that."
The goal of archaeology is to understand our past.
Much of what we know about long vanished peoples
comes from the excavation of their graves.
This work has shed light on the very roots of humanity.
But it has also disturbed the sacred sites of earlier cultures.
In recent years, the collecting and handling of human remains
have become more controversial, as native peoples around the world
demand a new respect for their ancestors.
The conflict is especially heated in North America.
In the last century, countless Indian burials have been stripped bare.
Today, museums and institutes across the United States
house the remains of some 300,000 Native Americans.
In 1927, this thousand-year-old burial site in Illinois
was opened to the public.
The Dickson Mounds Museum would prosper.
But in the 1980s,
Native Americans registered complaints about the exposed skeletons.
By the 1990s, protests were held outside the museum.
"...in our own land.
So this movement, the American Indian movement,
is said to be first a spiritual movement."
To political activist Vernon Bellecourt,
of the Ojibwa tribe, and to many others,
the burial display was deeply disturbing.
"We practice our spiritual way of life.
We still have our language, our prayer songs and,
and many of us who follow the traditional teachings of our,
of our grandfathers and grandmothers, we then take exception
when we see our burial sites being
desecrated and the physical remains of our ancestors
who are in an open burial pit for tourists and others to witness.
We decided to take some direct action."
In 1991, Bellecourt and four other activists were forcibly removed
from the museum for attempting to rebury the skeletons.
One year later, museum officials closed the display,
and completely covered it with earth.
Under a law passed in 1990, federally funded institutions
have begun to return Indian remains to their tribes.
Native peoples in Australia, New Zealand,
Africa and elsewhere are calling for similar policies.
Across time and space, the voices of the dead still reach us-
in the most surprising ways.
In 1991, a British housewife purchased a book at an antique market
near her home in the town of Bromsgrove.
Since childhood, Elizabeth Knight had been captivated
by Native American culture.
Her new book included a 1920s essay about an Indian chief
who visited London- and never returned home.
It was the story of Chief Long Wolf.
Legend has it, he was a seasoned Sioux warrior who fought at Little Big Horn.
Documents suggest he was one of several Indian "prisoners of war"
released by the US Government to the custody of Buffalo Bill Cody.
In 1892, Cody's Wild West Show toured Europe.
Chief Long Wolf, at age 59, was the oldest performer in the troupe.
In London, the show was applauded by Queen Victoria.
But Long Wolf developed pneumonia.
As he lay dying,
he asked his wife to take his body back to the land of his ancestors.
But on June 13th, he was buried, under the sign of the wolf,
in London's Brompton Cemetery.
His wife and child returned home.
In time, his gravesite was forgotten.
The chief's final wish touched Elizabeth deeply.
"I had the book for a couple of weeks and,
I put the book back on the shelf several times,
but eventually I had to take it down and said to my husband,
'I'll have to do something about this because it's really bothering me."'
Some 35,000 gravestones rise from the grounds of Brompton Cemetery.
On May 1, 1992, Elizabeth searched the aisles
until she found the weathered wolf.
"I made a vow to try and help him.
To try and find his family, because I knew his spirit would forever wander."
Half a world away, in Tempe, Arizona, Long Wolf was far from forgotten.
A retired mechanic, John Black Feather was born and raised in South Dakota,
not far from the site of Wounded Knee.
John had always known his great grandfather was buried in London-
but he had no idea exactly where.
"I've been hearing about Long Wolf ever since I was about five years old.
My mother always talked about trying to find him but still,
we didn't know how to go about finding him.
That's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
In 1992,
John's wife spotted a newspaper article that changed everything.
Elizabeth Knight's letter
marked the beginning of four years of planning and fundraising.
"Maybe you should writer her, a letter to her right away and see what..."
"I always knew that he would one day come home.
I never thought I'd be involved with it a hundred years later, but, I did."
September 25th, 1997.
The Black Feather family come to London to claim one of their own.
"It's not a sad day for us.
It's, it's, it's gonna be like a great homecoming for him
when we get him back to South Dakota."
For Elizabeth Knight it is a day of promises kept.
"This is a moment of resolution, of achievement, and blessing."
"It was the most extraordinary day of my life.
And I'm sure Long Wolf's spirit was there."
On September 28th, 1997, Long Wolf is laid to rest
in a small cemetery in Wolf Creek, South Dakota.
His descendants reenact an ancient rite,
this gesture of love beyond death.
More than anything else, it may be what makes us human.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
We walk in their footsteps.
We live on their graves.
Each time we speak their names, or honor their ways,
perhaps they do live again.
To be remembered, and nothing more.
That alone may be the secret to immortality.