REBROADCAST: Detective Stories

Summary

Radiolab – “Detective Stories” (REBROADCAST)
Original Air Date: July 11, 2011
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Episode Summary by [Your Assistant]

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Episode Overview

This episode of Radiolab, “Detective Stories,” explores the process of uncovering the past through unexpected clues found in unlikely places – from an enormous trash dump in Egypt to a bundle of lost letters, and even in the bloodlines traced through modern DNA. With their signature curiosity and story-driven approach, the hosts weave together three distinct investigative “detective stories” that highlight the surprising ways history is reconstructed from scattered fragments.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Past in the Trash: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

[01:28 – 18:29]

• Setting the Scene: Jad and Robert begin on Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, likening landfills to time capsules full of hidden stories and history ([03:41]).
• Time Capsule in Egypt: Story shifts to 1898 Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where Oxford archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt discovered ancient rubbish mounds—ten centuries’ worth of trash containing Greek papyri ([04:33]).
• Historic Discoveries:
  • Lost Sayings of Jesus: Among the first papyri unearthed was a list of sayings attributed to Jesus not found in the canonical Bible. The tone is described as “almost Eastern” ([06:08], “Heaven is here. The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth. It’s all around us and men do not see it…”) ([06:47]).
  • Monumental Archive: Over 700 boxes remain in Oxford, holding half a million fragments. Progress has only reached about 1% ([09:12], [11:44]).
  • Techniques: Scholars painstakingly piece together fragments, sometimes matching mere shreds (described as “a conglomeration of corn flakes”) ([10:08]).
• Most Notable Papyri (“Ancient Garbage Greatest Hits”):
  • #3 – The Number of the Beast ([12:22 – 14:26]): Earliest known manuscript of the notorious “666” passage—except the papyrus reads “616,” challenging a centuries-old biblical detail.
    • Quote: “Chi, Yoda, Sigma don’t say 666…they say 616.” – Dirk Obink ([13:39])
    • Scholars now note this variant in new editions of the New Testament.
  • #2 – A New Version of the Trojan War ([14:45 – 16:44]): Using infrared cameras, scholars read an alternative account by the poet Archilochus, in which Greek heroes ran away—“Running away is a good thing.” Contradictory, messy histories emerge from the fragments.
    • Quote: “One doesn’t have to call it weakness and cowardice…there does exist a proper time for flight.” – Dirk Obink ([16:12])
  • #1 – Ancient Bestsellers ([17:34 – 18:29]): Among the papyri are multiple copies of a “filthy satire,” suggesting broad appeal for racy literature in antiquity.

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2. The Mystery of Ella Chase: A Life Rediscovered

[19:48 – 41:10]

• Personal Storytelling: Laura Starcheski recounts her childhood fascination with abandoned places and artifacts ([20:07]).
• The Letters on the Road: In 1994, Eric Gordon finds hundreds of old letters scattered beside Highway 101 in California after a goat standing on a cow causes his companion to pull over ([22:15 – 23:14]).
  • More than “300 letters all written to one woman”—Ella Chase ([24:50]).
• Unfolding a Life: Ella emerges as a matriarchal figure, with dozens of GI’s from WWII addressing her as “mom,” despite not being related ([25:32]).
  • Quote (W. Murphy to Ella, 1941): “Well, Mom, I hope you don’t mind me calling you this...I hope I can be seeing you again.” ([25:45])
• Obsession & Investigation: Eric constructs a curriculum around the letters, tasking students to imagine “ghost biographies” of Ella ([28:08]).
  • Quote: “I feel like a guardian of this person’s moment on earth.” – Eric ([28:54])
• Radio-Detective Work: Laura travels to California with genealogist Marina Cole to trace Ella’s family:
  • Attempts to contact descendants fail ([29:51]).
  • Search at Ella’s former home and with neighbors yields scant results ([31:24]).
  • Obituary research reveals family rifts and a mysterious, unclaimed husband ([32:19 – 34:18]).
  • Emotional impact: “She probably needed them [the soldiers] as much as they needed her.” ([35:08])
• Resolution: Upon returning, Laura discovers the real reason for the letters’ presence: Ella’s grandson Bob, while transporting family effects, had the box of letters blow out of his truck ([37:56, 39:01]).
  • Quote: “I think I can help fill in the pieces to the puzzle because [the letters] probably came out of my truck.” – Bob, Ella’s grandson ([37:56])
  • Eric and Bob exchange letters and photos, sharing the family legacy.

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3. Detective Story in DNA: Genghis Khan’s Hidden Heirs

[42:51 – 57:37]

• Introduction to Genetic Sleuthing: The segment begins by explaining how the Y chromosome’s stability enables the tracking of male genetic lines ([43:36]).
• Scientific Journey:
  • Geneticists, including Spencer Wells and Tatiana Zerjal, collect blood samples throughout Central Asia ([45:24 – 46:55]).
  • Shock discovery: Millions of men share a peculiar mutation on the Y chromosome, indicating a single male ancestor about 1,000 years ago ([47:30 – 48:40]).
  • Map analysis reveals the lineage matches the Mongol Empire’s spread ([49:18]).
  • Realization: “I think I found Genghis Khan.” – Tatiana ([49:49])
• Historical and Cultural Resonance:
  • Genghis Khan’s conquests involved both the killing of rival male lines and prolific reproduction ([50:39 – 51:55]).
  • Quote: “If you kill a man, you kill, in a sense, a chromosomal lineage.” – Tatiana Zerjal ([50:39])
  • Professor Morris Rossabi confirms legend: "Yes, that’s true…save the pretty ones for the boss." ([51:42])
  • The science suggests Genghis Khan may be the most “biologically successful man in world history.” ([52:18])
• Pop DNA Craze: DNA testing companies market the discovery, restaurants run “Genghis Khan ancestor” contests ([53:27 – 53:54]).
  • Quote: “If I came up positive, am I really Genghis Khan’s descendant?” – Jad ([54:08])
  • Scientists respond: Only finding and testing Genghis’s remains would give absolute proof ([54:22]).
• The Hunt for Genghis’s Body:
  • Maury Kravitz leads expeditions seeking Genghis’s tomb, but no conclusive find ([55:15 – 56:54]).
  • Focus may shift to Kubla Khan’s grave for DNA matching ([57:15]).
• Conclusion: Jad reflects on how history is hidden everywhere: “The blood coursing through your veins tells you, I have a story for you. Same with a little bit of garbage...there are clues to the past everywhere.” ([58:30 – 58:46])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I know years ago…an archaeological garbage man…came up with a hot dog that was 10 years old and it was still a hot dog.” – Jad Abumrad ([02:05])
• “This is one big time capsule…waiting, patiently, until someone comes to look for it. And someone always does.” – Jad Abumrad ([03:43])
• “We’re talking about the reconstruction of works…the work on which is beyond the scale of a single human lifetime.” – Dirk Obink ([09:12])
• “Does that mean all the Bibles are wrong?” – Robert Krulwich; “Or maybe.” – Jad Abumrad ([13:48])
• “There are clues about the past everywhere. And if it’s a knock on your door and you decide to open the door and take a look—who knows what you will find and who knows where you will go.” – Robert Krulwich ([58:30])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Start & Introduction to Time Capsules: [01:28 – 04:33]
• Discovery of Ancient Trash in Egypt: [04:33 – 18:29]
• The Letters of Ella Chase: [19:48 – 41:10]
  • Goat-on-cow story & the initial find of letters: [22:15 – 24:50]
  • Investigation & resolution with the family: [29:51 – 39:42]
• Genghis Khan DNA Mystery: [42:51 – 57:37]

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Tone and Style

The episode blends wonder, humor, and poignancy as the hosts and guests marvel at the way random fragments, whether literal trash or old genetic markers, can upend what we thought we knew about the past. The stories validate both scholarly rigor and serendipitous discovery, presenting the past as messy, contradictory, and always open to reinterpretation.

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For a full experience and all supporting materials, visit radiolab.org.

Transcript

[Robert Krulwich]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Robert Krulwich]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Morris Rasabi]

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[Tatiana Zeria]

Liberty.

[Robert Krulwich]

Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. This ad is only 15 seconds. In that amount of time, there are likely to be an average of over 15,000 cyber threats to all businesses, so there's no time to wait. Get threat ready with comcast [e-mail] cybersecurity.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Big news.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wayfarer's Black Friday sale is here right now. Score up to 80% off everything home. These are our best deals of the year. Shop Wayfair's Black Friday sale [e-mail] Wayfair Every style, every home. Wait, you're listening. Okay.

[Laura Starcheski]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from WNY.

[Laura Starcheski]

And npr. Do you want to get out?

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this. Is this us? Yeah, this is us.

[Laura Starcheski]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Since our program today deals with stumbling upon the past in unlikely places, we thought we'd begin this part of the show. Well, not in a place we'd normally visit, so I feel like we're standing on top of a mountain. But how high up are we? Right here? I believe we're about 180. This, by the way, is Chief Dennis Diggins. I'm an assistant chief in the New York City Department of Sanitation. And when he says 180, he means about 180ft high. That's about 18 stories, correct? 18 stories up into the Staten island sky. That's where we're standing.

[Laura Starcheski]

Where?

[Jad Abumrad]

We're standing on a hill, basically like a big dirt hill. And at a glance, you'd never know that this hill was made from anything other than dirt. What did this used to be? Unless, of course, you dug about a few feet down. This is all garbage underneath us. Up Until March of 2001, we were taking in all of New York City's garbage. All the burros were coming here, all the burrows were coming here. So we were probably taking in, on average, 11,000 tons a day. Fresh Kills used to be the biggest dump on the planet. But that's all in the past. With a little engineering help, it's gonna be a great park. Absolutely. This will be a park I mean, just look at how much property you have. All these mounds are getting wrapped in plastic and covered with grass. And there'll be a restaurant. I can almost imagine that. Even a golf course. Yeah, I would love to be the first one to tee off on that. But underneath it all, the garbage will still be here. 50 years of trash waiting patiently until someone comes to look for it. And someone always does. I know years ago, we. There was a. A garbage. An arch. Archea. How do I say it right? Archaeological garbage man that came here and he did some core sampling, meaning with a special tool, this guy bored a hole deep into the center of the mound. Actually came up with a hot Dog Landfill. 10 years previously. Are you kidding me? Hot dog that was 10 years old and it was still a hot dog. Still a hot dog. Recognizably a hot dog. Recognizably a hot dog. So that's. That's amazing. And disgusting.

[Robert Krulwich]

I still like hot dogs, so I'll eat them.

[Jad Abumrad]

But, David, seriously, do you ever consider the history that's contained in this, in this big chunk of garbage? Oh, yeah. Well, this is one big time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule.

[Robert Krulwich]

Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule. Time capsule.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can stop saying that now, thank you. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, a series about science and discovery. And that is exactly what we have for you today. Three detective stories.

[Robert Krulwich]

And each one begins with a rather.

[Jad Abumrad]

Peculiar clue, clues that lead you back into the past. Time capsule. Time capsule. And now that we've got that phrase in our minds, and garbage as well, let's go to a different part of the world and get things started for real. To a different time also. 1898. Egypt. Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. You with me?

[Robert Krulwich]

Where is Oxyrhynchus?

[Jad Abumrad]

Egypt? Yeah, it's in the south, in the desert. South of Cairo, I think. And let me show you a picture. You see the desert?

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, yeah. It's a big, flat, sort of sandy place. And who is this guy?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, you should see two guys. They are. They're two Oxford archaeologists. Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

With a pith helmet and sort of standing high on a mound looking down.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. One guy is on top of the mound, the other guy is toward the bottom. That's Grenfell and Hunt, two Oxford archaeologists. They were in Egypt in 1898 looking for treasure, and they find those sand.

[Robert Krulwich]

Dunes, which don't look quite like the other sand dunes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? Yeah, they're sort of Strange and irregularly shaped, which is why when they saw those sand dunes that you're looking at, they hired a team of workers and they started to dig. And they immediately began to find things.

[Dirk Obink]

Huge quantity of pottery, clothes, shoes, baskets, rope.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Dirk Obink, a scholar from Oxford. He tells the story of what they found. What they found was basically the mother lode.

[Dirk Obink]

A huge circle of rubbish mounds, over 20 of them, that were completely undisturbed.

[Jad Abumrad]

This was no piddly little trash heap that was 50 years old like you might find in Staten Island. Mounds were really old.

[Dirk Obink]

These were rubbish mounds that had built up over the course of ten centuries.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ten centuries of trash.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's a thousand years of trash.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And that included a lot of ancient paper. That's what they were really interested in, any scraps or scrolls they could find.

[Dirk Obink]

And one of the first ones that they pulled out of the ground was lost sayings of Jesus.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[Dirk Obink]

That was the first one that they pulled out of the ground.

[Morris Rasabi]

He who knows the all, but fails.

[Jad Abumrad]

To know himself, lacks everything.

[Morris Rasabi]

If they say to you, whence have you come?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, forget the 10 year old hot dog. Here we have sayings of Jesus which have not been seen, read, or even heard about for almost 2,000 years.

[Dirk Obink]

A long list of sayings that are not in the canonical books of the Bible.

[Morris Rasabi]

He who seeks, let him not cease.

[Jad Abumrad]

Seeking until he finds. This is a different Jesus than the one in the Bible. It's almost Eastern in tone. He says, heaven is here. The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth. It's all around us and men do not see it. If we just opened our eyes, it's.

[Dirk Obink]

A papyrus that today is known as the Loggia fragment.

[Jad Abumrad]

There it was, buried in the trash.

[Laura Starcheski]

Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Anyhow, the team pulled as much paper as they could from the mounds, separated out all the shoes and stuff and just took the paper.

[Dirk Obink]

And then they packed those up into hundreds of boxes and shipped them back here to Oxford. This is the Sackler Library in Oxford. And we're still today, 107 years later. We're going upstairs now. We're still today opening those boxes, pulling out the fragments, piecing them back together and deciphering them.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is what 2000 year old paper sounds like. Sounds just like paper. And it looks like dried leaves. Not really much to look at or listen to. But knowing that it's 2000 years old and theoretically could have been written on by Jesus himself, well, that makes it a little more special, which is why we visited Oxford, England, where the dump now lives packed away in 700 boxes.

[Dirk Obink]

This booklet contains about 600 unpublished papyri.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nick Ganis, one of the collection's curators, popped one open for us.

[Dirk Obink]

Just opening an official document sometime early.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the 4th century.

[Dirk Obink]

Of course, it's full of holes, probably.

[Jad Abumrad]

Caused by little worms. And there's the sad part. There are enough secrets in these boxes to rewrite the past. The problem is much of this is hopelessly fragmented. Reading it is almost impossible.

[Dirk Obink]

Some of the smaller fragments, if you see lots of them that look like.

[Jad Abumrad]

A conglomeration of corn flakes.

[Dirk Obink]

It will be a few hundred years before even.

[Jad Abumrad]

The most substantial of these fragments come to light.

[Dirk Obink]

We're talking about the reconstruction of works, the work on which is beyond the scale of a single human lifetime.

[Jad Abumrad]

Way beyond. In the past 170 years, the Oxford team has worked their way through a whopping 1% of the collection. It may take another 10 centuries to get through the rest. Here's how it usually goes. Nick scours the boxes each day, finds a new scrap, tiny little scrap, brings it into the lab for cleaning. What I do now is I remove some ancient mud with the help of a brush. Here he wipes ancient mud from a torn page of Homer's Iliad. After it's mud free, each piece is cataloged in the computer for various features.

[Dirk Obink]

Like type of handwriting, size and style.

[Jad Abumrad]

And if the piece seems to match other pieces, Durkin, maybe a grad student, spread them all out on a long wooden table. And basically from there, it's a classic jigsaw puzzle.

[Dirk Obink]

How about this one? Doesn't it look like these might be the line beginnings of they move one here.

[Robert Krulwich]

I think that that looks like a promising match.

[Jad Abumrad]

See if the words match up because.

[Dirk Obink]

They seem to line up pretty exactly with the lines of the larger fragment.

[Jad Abumrad]

It may take five minutes, it may take five years, may take five lifetimes, but eventually they will have, well, not the whole story, not even a page of the whole story, but something.

[Morris Rasabi]

I've put the papyrus under an electronic microscope.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe just a few Greek words from the deep past.

[Dirk Obink]

But we're missing a bit from the upper right corner. Sometimes a sentence breaks off just when you need it to tell you what you need to know. We have to be satisfied with knowing a little rather than a lot.

[Robert Krulwich]

Make sure I understand this is each of these fragments just a teeny like.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is it to be or it's more like two.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, it's that small.

[Jad Abumrad]

Some of them are tiny. Tiny. I mean, there's about a half a million in total. Half a million, and they've only got through about 5,000.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, do you have in your own list of things, like a sort of favorite hits list?

[Jad Abumrad]

I do. I do. I've narrowed it down to my top three.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

My top three. Ancient Garbage greatest hits, if you will, which was difficult. But here are three that are really interesting. First, number three, Ancient Garbage greatest hits. Number three. You being a death metal fan, I'm sure are familiar with these three inauspicious numbers.

[Robert Krulwich]

Absolutely. 666. Sign of the beast.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. Just to explain that the number of the beast, 666, is what you use to either summon the beast or to keep the beast away because you can't say his name directly. That would be bad. All this comes from the New Testament.

[Dirk Obink]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dirk showed me a piece of papyrus that he found in the dump. It's about the size of your palm. So what are we looking at? This looks like this may be 30 letters. A copy of precisely that passage in the New Testament where the number is stated.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast. For it is a human number. Its number is 666.

[Dirk Obink]

666, which was the traditional number of the beast.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, here's the thing. This little scrap of papyrus that Dirk turned up is the earliest known copy that we have of that passage he showed me. Can you point to the letters again and show me? These three numbers are smack in the center of the papyrus.

[Dirk Obink]

Three Greek letters. Chi, Yoda and sigma.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chi Yoda Sigma. Chi Yoda Sigma should say 666, right?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

But in fact, Chi, Yoda Sigma don't say 666.

[Robert Krulwich]

They don't. What did they say?

[Dirk Obink]

Six six, one, six one six.

[Jad Abumrad]

No.

[Dirk Obink]

Instead of 666.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Does that mean all the Bibles are wrong?

[Jad Abumrad]

Or maybe. I mean, all we really know is that the number of the beast had versions and that 616 may be the original. Wow. How long does it take this to filter into the King James Bible or something like that?

[Dirk Obink]

Oh, no. It will appear in the next standard edition of the New Testament in a note on that page representing it as a viable variant that has now appeared in a papyrus text.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do biblical scholars accept this?

[Jad Abumrad]

They do.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh. So you should just probably be very careful about 6 blank 6. If you aren't worrying about the beast.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, you should probably change your tattoo. Shh. All right, let's move on to number two. Garbage. Greatest hits. Number two. Hey, did you see the movie Troy? Yes. You Remember this scene, Hector.

[Robert Krulwich]

Big, bold, muscular men fighting Big, bold, muscular fights with big, bold, muscular enemies. Hector. I know the film, and I know a big, bold, bold and muscular. It was Hector. What did your scrap tell you?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, the papyri folks recently, this is big news in the. In the world of the papyrologists. They got their hands on this special camera.

[Robert Krulwich]

So we have this digital setup here. A camera on a. On a sort of easel.

[Jad Abumrad]

This camera uses infrared filters to photograph text that's so faded that you can't really see it with the naked eye.

[Robert Krulwich]

Take a.

[Morris Rasabi]

Quite a long exposure.

[Jad Abumrad]

In any case, the first thing that they read with that camera is a.

[Dirk Obink]

Poem about the Trojan War, the new poem of Archilochus. This poem, Argeon Effarbesa Pallon Straton Hoidento.

[Jad Abumrad]

Comes from the 600s.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, it's not Homer. It's Archilochus version.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, it's precisely not Homer, because whereas the Homeric version, the Brad Pitt version, it goes, you know, greeks invade, Troy falls, hurrah. This version goes, greeks invade, get their butts kicked, then run, run like sissies.

[Dirk Obink]

So it completely turns the Homeric account on its head.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this guy.

[Robert Krulwich]

This was written at the same time.

[Jad Abumrad]

As Homer, a little bit later, but in response to Homer.

[Dirk Obink]

Oh, and the Greek goes like this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here, listen.

[Dirk Obink]

One doesn't have to call it weakness and cowardice, having to retreat. No, there does exist a proper time for flight.

[Jad Abumrad]

See, Homer's notion was that, like, the hero stands and fights to the end. But this poet was saying, you know what? We ran away.

[Dirk Obink]

We turned our backs to flee quickly, and that's okay. He actually celebrated it as something that he was proud of, because sometimes you had to turn and run.

[Robert Krulwich]

Running away is a good thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Running away is a good thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's good one.

[Jad Abumrad]

See, what's interesting about the past you find in the trash is that it's messy. It's complicated. There's not just a story, you know, there's contradictions to that story, competing accounts of that story, which can be disconcerting. I mean, you know, who wants to have different Bibles floating around? That could be weird for people. But to me, to know that way back when, even then, there were different ideas about what it means to be a hero that I find comforting. Which brings us to my first choice and last, but hardly least, ancient Garbage. Greatest hit number. Well, the greatest hit. What do you think people in the first century were reading?

[Robert Krulwich]

What do I think they were reading?

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you think they were really reading.

[Dirk Obink]

Okay, when the text starts, she's saying, oh, I'm terribly on fire. And that goes in Greek. Deinos phlegomai realma me, AKA diasse. The translation, uh, oh, it's thick and big as a roof beam. Oh, no, you. And then she goes on Menai catamaker porn.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's what they were reading. This filthy satire turned up enough times in this and other dumps for Dirk to suspect that it may have been a bestseller.

[Robert Krulwich]

So there was more than one version of this?

[Jad Abumrad]

It appeared over and over and over.

[Dirk Obink]

I'm burning. I'm on fire. I'm terribly on fire. A stream runs over me. Do you understand? And I'm being bitten.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're listening to Radiolab from New York Public Radio.

[Dirk Obink]

W N Y, C, npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what? What?

[Dirk Obink]

Keep listening.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Laura Starcheski]

This podcast of Radiolab is supported by the innovators and organic taste creators at Honest Tea. Certified organic bottled tea since 1999. Honest tea is brewed with real organic tea leaves and ingredients. Staying true to nature, Honest Tea's just a tad sweet. Drinks can be found wherever beverages are sold. More information about Honest Tea's mission in a bottle is available at facebook.com honesttea Nature got it right. We put it in a bott.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our show today is about finding clues to the past in the weirdest places. And there is no weirder place to find the past than in the story you're about to hear comes to us from Laura Staracheski, who herself likes to get into old things.

[Laura Starcheski]

My mom kind of fostered that. Like, when we were little, one of our outings that we would do would be to go to this toxic dump near my house where I grew up. It's like on top of a mountain. They sealed off this mountain and they made all the people move off of it. So you're just walking along a trail and then you see all these old abandoned houses full of stuff. So we would would go into the houses and we'd find pay stubs, we'd find dishes, we'd find paintings, and we'd try and figure out why. Like, even though we knew really why the people had left, we would try and make up other stories about why they left. Like maybe they were fighting in the middle of dinner and they just had to leave all their dishes on the table.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, fast forward many years. Laura is in New York, and one day she gets a call from her sister, who tells her I just heard the most amazing story. I was at my writing class, and the teacher told us this story. You should call him Eric Gordon is his name. Take your tape recorder over to his office in Manhattan. Make him tell it to you. So that's what she did.

[Laura Starcheski]

I just said at first, you know, I just want to record you telling the story.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, how you doing, Bucky?

[Laura Starcheski]

How he had found all these letters and photos and created a character. I had no idea that I would become so involved. Okay, so do you want to talk about that day that the story took place?

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure. That day.

[Morris Rasabi]

Let me see if I can put myself back in that day. So I was living in Oakland at.

[Laura Starcheski]

The time, this is about 1994, and.

[Morris Rasabi]

Decided to go on a weekend camping trip with a friend. And we're driving south on Route 101 through the Central part of the state, and my friend starts to frantically shout, look, look. And she's pointing out to this field. She can't even get the words out. She's saying, look, look, and she's shouting.

[Laura Starcheski]

So he tries to look.

[Morris Rasabi]

I turn my head very quickly, and.

[Laura Starcheski]

He can't see because his view is blocked by an overpass or a hill. And he just has no idea what she's talking about.

[Morris Rasabi]

And she is stuttering her words. And she says, there's. And she's still stuttering. There's a goat standing on a cow's.

[Laura Starcheski]

Back in that field.

[Jad Abumrad]

A what?

[Laura Starcheski]

A goat standing on top of a cow.

[Jad Abumrad]

A goat standing on top of a cow?

[Laura Starcheski]

Yeah.

[Morris Rasabi]

And, you know, of course, my reaction is, that's absurd. And she's saying, pull this truck over. Pull over. And she's getting really angry. And I said, I'm not backing up three quarters of a mile on 101.

[Laura Starcheski]

So they argue for a little while, and Eric finally relents. Twenty minutes later, they arrive back at the field.

[Morris Rasabi]

So we pull over, and she just gets the hugest grin on her face. There is, in fact, a goat standing.

[Laura Starcheski]

On a cow's back still there.

[Morris Rasabi]

We sit in the truck for a minute watching this cow who's close enough to the fence that we got a very good view of it. And every time he takes a step to graze, the goat kind of shifts from side to side, balancing.

[Laura Starcheski]

So they're kind of this unit.

[Morris Rasabi]

I mean, really amazing. You actually could see the goat's hoofs kind of bunch up in the cow's skin. And we get out of the truck.

[Laura Starcheski]

They slowly get out of the truck to get a better look.

[Morris Rasabi]

And right as I shut the door.

[Laura Starcheski]

The goat jumps off.

[Morris Rasabi]

The goat jumps off. And, you know, we're standing there kind of dumbfounded. We move up to the. To the fence.

[Laura Starcheski]

And just believe it or not, the story gets weirder.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Laura Starcheski]

Yeah. So Eric and his friend are standing totally still, hoping that if they just wait, maybe the goat will jump back onto the cow. And all of a sudden, Eric's friend notices something at her feet.

[Morris Rasabi]

She bends down and picks up a letter. A letter right in front of the fence.

[Laura Starcheski]

And it's old. And it's kind of like 50 years old.

[Morris Rasabi]

Crisp brown. Then we looked at the postmark and it was 1952. I open this thing up and read it, and it's almost about nothing. My dear, I wrote you a card after receiving the first one. See, some of these are so tough to read. So I look down on the ground and there's another letter. I've been slowly getting on my feet again. And another ED is so much better. Looks like that's her looped F. And another. Albertine sings very well indeed, since you ask. They were blown literally in this line down the side of the highway. And we looked at each other and frantically started gathering these letters, filling our arms with them. Letters from the 1920s. I see a 1937 postmark. And then she shouts from a couple feet away. 1897. 1890. I'm gathering, my arms are getting full. I run to the truck and grab a garbage bag and I start filling it up. And then I start to notice Ella Chase. Ella Chase. Ella Chase. Ella Chase. These letters are all written to the same woman.

[Laura Starcheski]

Over 300 letters all written to one woman. Ella Chase.

[Morris Rasabi]

You know, forget the goat and the cow. Now we're standing in the middle of somebody's whole life correspondence spread out on the side of Highway 101. And we just read and we read and we read into the night. Let me see if I can find. These are really.

[Laura Starcheski]

So that day back in 1994 began a 12 year obsession with Ella Chase. These letters are maybe Eric's favorite thing in the whole world. He keeps them in this big archival box in his closet.

[Morris Rasabi]

Now, what's really interesting is there are a ton of letters that are written to her as mother or Mom.

[Laura Starcheski]

The first thing Eric pulls out is this big stack of letters written to Ella during World War II.

[Morris Rasabi]

Probably have 40 letters from boys in the the Navy to Ella Chase with that read by censor stamp on the letter where they're calling her mom. I'll read you one. And this is one that I. 4-2-1941, from a GI named W. Murphy. And he writes, well, Mom, I hope you don't mind me calling you this because you were swallowed me and just a mother to me. And I hope I can be seeing you again.

[Jad Abumrad]

And keep writing to me, if you will. I sure enjoyed hearing from you. Hope you received the letter that I wrote a few days ago, but mail is a little slow going and coming out here. I'm feeling fine, only a little tired. But that's nothing unusual as we are pretty busy all the time. Well, Ma, I better close and say a prayer for me, if you will. And God bless you. Love, W. Murphy. August 3, 1945. Somewhere. Dear Mom, Were these her kids?

[Laura Starcheski]

No, they're not her kids. They're boys, 18, 20 years old, who were so attached to her just by writing to her that they started to call her mom. And there were like 40 of these.

[Morris Rasabi]

Letters, and a number of them, from what I can tell in the letters, have never actually met her. So she became this matriarch to all of these men in the war.

[Laura Starcheski]

I had never seen anything like that before.

[Morris Rasabi]

Yeah, there's so much something like this.

[Laura Starcheski]

I was just amazed by the reach of her personality. You know, he showed me dozens of letters thanking her.

[Morris Rasabi]

You look at this. I am so very grateful.

[Laura Starcheski]

Thank you for what you did for my husband.

[Jad Abumrad]

He is.

[Laura Starcheski]

Thank you for changing the way that I think about my life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa.

[Laura Starcheski]

And these seem to be from people who I'd only met her once.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Laura Starcheski]

Yeah.

[Morris Rasabi]

The reverence that people just speak to her and, you know, I can't figure out when she was married. I can't figure out where she was married. She ran for political office. I mean, this is a fascinating woman. She ran for political office in the 1940s, but I don't know what office.

[Laura Starcheski]

And that's where the story ends.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's where the story ends, yeah.

[Laura Starcheski]

Eric has never tried to find out anything more. Remember how I told you he was a teacher before?

[Morris Rasabi]

Yeah.

[Laura Starcheski]

He started bringing all these letters into his classroom and ended up designing this whole curriculum around them.

[Morris Rasabi]

I collaborated with a history teacher. The kids would each get a photograph. They'd have to put it in a plastic sleeve. Each one of the kids, whenever they handled them, had to put on surgical gloves. In history, the students would research that time period, and then ultimately they'd bring that work back to my classroom, my English classroom, and they would start writing historical fiction.

[Laura Starcheski]

Eric would ask each student to create a ghost biography of Ella Chase, this woman's history, using her letters as a.

[Morris Rasabi]

Springboard and some of the, you know, some of the pieces were wonderful. He just incredible.

[Laura Starcheski]

He even had them title their papers My Ella.

[Morris Rasabi]

That's what's been much more meaningful to me.

[Laura Starcheski]

So the way Eric sees it, the real Ella was abandoned and he's given her new life.

[Morris Rasabi]

You know, I feel like a guardian of this person's moment on the earth.

[Laura Starcheski]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This was a three morning announcement for flight number 169 to San Jose, California. So here's the thing. I was already going to California to visit a friend. And I couldn't leave things the way they were. Like the whole time when I was look at these letters and look at the pictures, I would feel like there's more here.

[Robert Krulwich]

Flying time to San Jose will be.

[Jad Abumrad]

Approximately 5 hours and 56 minutes.

[Laura Starcheski]

How did someone who reached out to all these people end up with their life on the side of the highway? I really wanted to know. Do you want to see some of this stuff? Because I brought it. You brought some? I knew I'd need help, so I contacted the this friend of a friend, Marina Cole. She's this amateur expert in genealogical research. And I showed her the letters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, you had the letters? Did Eric give them to you?

[Laura Starcheski]

Yeah. Even though he was convinced that they were abandoned, he told me, you know.

[Morris Rasabi]

I would love to find family, that this would truly mean something to Dear Mom.

[Laura Starcheski]

It's not her son. It's one of these letters from the the World War II soldiers who all called her mom. Oh, wow. As soon as I started showing Marina the letters, her face kind of lit up.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Laura Starcheski]

She is amazing. The first thing we decided to do was to go to a historical society. This woman, and we know that she lived in Lomita Park. Since this is for Daly City, I assume. I went back and looked at census records to find out a little bit more about her. We found out that Ella had two granddaughters who were still alive. So we sent letters to her granddaughters, but they'd Never respond. Day 2 Stay straight, go onto Napa Valley Highway. My idea, my fantasy this whole time has been, we'll go to her house. The address that's on the letters. Well, it's worth a shot. Yeah, why not? Maybe bring one of the letters. It was a single story house, little rose garden. I think houses have a strong history. Someone there will be able to tell us something about her. Are they coming? I don't know. No answer. So we tried a neighbor.

[Robert Krulwich]

What is it you want?

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi.

[Laura Starcheski]

I'm sorry to bother you. I'm looking to find information about a woman who's.

[Jad Abumrad]

I have no idea.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're new here in Napa.

[Laura Starcheski]

Okay, well, thank you so much.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ugh.

[Laura Starcheski]

The missing husband. I can't find anything on him at all. He's a complete mystery. I mean, there were a lot of unanswered questions. So we knew that we had to find Ella's obituary. Day three. The Napa Public Library. We're in front of the microphone, Crofish, and we're scrolling through dates. August 22nd. This was kind of our last hope. Look. The death notice comes up on the screen. Chase in Napa. Monday, July 4, 1950. We scan it as fast as we can for any new names that we haven't seen before. Rexford.

[Jad Abumrad]

See?

[Laura Starcheski]

Green, Millbrae. Almost right away, we notice Robert. Robert Liley. That's a grandson. There was a grandson. A grandson. We had never seen this name before he was listed.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hi, this is Bob.

[Laura Starcheski]

Hi, this is Carol.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're either down at the store getting some milk or we don't know where I am.

[Jad Abumrad]

We're somewhere.

[Laura Starcheski]

Bye. Hi, this is a message for Robert. My name is Laura Starcheski. I'm a reporter and I'm doing a story about a woman who I believe is your grandmother. Her name was Ella. I wanted to hear a voice. I wanted a voice. Marina returned to Los Altos to get back to her life. And I waited. One day passed, then another. I didn't get a call back from him. Day six. It was Marina. Marina. She hadn't been able to stop researching. It's really sad. What is it? Well, in 1938, she filed for divorce. And there's a series of articles where he denies that they were married. Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

She pleaded with me to marry her. Ella did.

[Morris Rasabi]

But we couldn't get along and I.

[Robert Krulwich]

Refused to do it.

[Laura Starcheski]

She was desperate for money. She needed to sell the house. She couldn't do that without divorcing her husband.

[Jad Abumrad]

Trial of sensational I'm not married case expected in June.

[Laura Starcheski]

It went on for like a year. The huge headlines. Ella said they were married. Bellman, her husband says that they never were. Ella couldn't produce a marriage certificate. And then finally, the whole thing ended with her just sitting in the courtroom, refusing to answer questions.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ella, a chase of Lomita Park. Still adamant and defiant, but this time alone, steadfastly refused to answer questions.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then.

[Laura Starcheski]

And that really wasn't the worst of it. And then I found this really sad article from a few years later. Let me find this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Christmas, 1942. Death took no holiday On Christmas Eve, Bellman Chase wandered along. Dimmed out south of Market.

[Robert Krulwich]

He had been drinking heavily.

[Jad Abumrad]

He was separated from his wife and family. Perhaps he was trying to erase thoughts.

[Robert Krulwich]

That come to men at such times.

[Jad Abumrad]

Christmas Day, sprawled on his back on.

[Robert Krulwich]

A sidewalk, he died. The warm sun shone clear on the fractured nose and the blue bruise on his chin. Looks like the bum is dead, someone.

[Jad Abumrad]

Said a couple days later.

[Laura Starcheski]

It says that his body was left unclaimed in the morgue and they were not able to locate his estranged wife. Really? It suddenly made sense. It was right after the that she started writing to World War II soldiers. She probably needed them as much as they needed her. Day 7. Holy Cross Cemetery in South San Francisco. Oh, look, look. Wow, that's a nice headstone. It is a really nice headstone. It was gray and unpolished, and she was buried with her mother and father. I wish I'd brought flowers. I know I could go pick some flowers right over there. We could.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Yeah, let's do that.

[Laura Starcheski]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

On our final approach, please make sure your seat bags and trays are in their upright and locked position.

[Laura Starcheski]

As soon as I got back, I went to Eric's office.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, how you doing?

[Laura Starcheski]

I had all these newspaper clippings in my bag, and I was ready to show him.

[Jad Abumrad]

How were you feeling at this point?

[Laura Starcheski]

I was feeling a little nervous. Yeah. Some of it is kind of sad, and I just want to make sure that you're ready for that. It's not necessarily positive enlightenment about her family. So let me get it out. As I'm taking the stuff out of my backpack, He stops me right before I hand it to him.

[Morris Rasabi]

There's a part of me that's not sure that I want to see it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Morris Rasabi]

I think if there's no one that would receive these artifacts ultimately or that would have some sort of connection and appreciation to them, I'm not sure I want to see it.

[Laura Starcheski]

You don't want to know any of it.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't.

[Morris Rasabi]

If there's no one to take them over, I want to live with him as a mystery.

[Laura Starcheski]

I couldn't blame Eric. I was even a little bit jealous of him at that point because he got to choose whether or not to look at this stuff.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what then?

[Laura Starcheski]

I went home. But as soon as I got home, there was a message on my answering machine.

[Robert Krulwich]

This message is for Laura. My name is Bob, grandson of Ella Chase. And he called and left a message for me to try and get a hold of you regarding some pictures and letters and stuff that was found along the roadside. I think I can help fill in the pieces to the puzzle because they probably came out of my truck. On the way from San Jose to Southern California.

[Laura Starcheski]

I have some pretty big news for you. As soon as I got home, after I talked to you on Friday, I got a message from Ella's grandson. He's the one who dropped the box.

[Robert Krulwich]

It was during the course of driving down Highway 101, taking these boxes home in the back of my pickup, that several of them blew out, and he.

[Laura Starcheski]

Tried to pull over and get it.

[Robert Krulwich]

I stopped alongside the road. My wife was with me, and we picked up everything we could see.

[Laura Starcheski]

But as soon as he started to collect it, the California highway patrol pulled over and told him that he had to keep going.

[Robert Krulwich]

They were going to give me a.

[Laura Starcheski]

Ticket for littering because the stuff scattered.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everywhere, because the stuff was just blowing everywhere.

[Laura Starcheski]

And he has a whole bunch of boxes like the one that fell off.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm still going through this stuff, and it's been 12, 13 years now.

[Morris Rasabi]

I love that he actually found who dropped this stuff. Did he sound sad about it? What was he his reaction?

[Laura Starcheski]

He just seemed happy. Go lucky about it. He was like, I think I can solve your mystery because I drive. When I was talking to Bob, I told him about Eric, of course, and I told him how much Eric cared about all this stuff. And he was really relieved. He didn't think it was weird at all. He just was glad that someone had cherished this stuff. And he came up with the idea right away of sending Eric kind of a replacement.

[Robert Krulwich]

I have another group of pictures.

[Laura Starcheski]

Eric sent Bob all of Ella's stuff. Bob sent Eric this mystery box full of photos that he couldn't explain.

[Jad Abumrad]

I still can't get over the timing, though. Okay, so Bob passes by in the truck. The box flies out. And then what? Like a couple hours later, this goat jumps on a cow's back and causes these two people to stop and get the letters, basically. Do you think the goat on a cow was a sign?

[Laura Starcheski]

What do you mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

From Zeus, saying, stop, Eric, stop.

[Laura Starcheski]

I think you could tell it that way. But goats like to stand on top of cows.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Laura Starcheski]

Yeah. Goats like to stand on top of anything high. If there's a fence, they'll jump on top of it. If there's a house, they'll try and climb it. That's what goats do, don't you think?

[Jad Abumrad]

So how do you know all this?

[Laura Starcheski]

I've seen goats. You know, my mom used to send me up the road to buy eggs from this woman. Who had all these goats, and they had a little goat shack, and all the goats would be clustered on top of the goat shack, although they had a whole yard full of scraggly grass to graze in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Did you ever say to Eric, eric, goats just kind of like to do this?

[Laura Starcheski]

No, I never said that to him. I mean, okay, goats like to stand on tall things, but since when does a cow not care? The goat's not extraordinary. It's the cow.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's the nonchalant cow.

[Laura Starcheski]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Laura Starcheski is a producer. She lives in New York.

[Robert Krulwich]

A nonchalant cow. Well, I hope you'll stay with us. Our next detective story begins with a drop of blood. And. And from the blood, we discover 16 and a half million baby boys.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krovich and I will continue in a moment. You're listening to Radiolab from New York Public Radio. Public Radio, WNYCNYC and npr.

[Laura Starcheski]

Sam. Sa.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Today on our program, stories about stumbling onto the past and finding surprises, strange things. Which brings us to DNA. DNA is used to track crimes. This we know from police dramas like csi. Far less glamorously, but no less interestingly, historians and geneticists use DNA to go way back in time and answer basic questions about who we are and where we came from. And that is an unlikely development, if you think about it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, because usually when, you know, if someone has sex with someone else, the DNA gets mixed. So the DNA is always changing from one generation to the next.

[Jad Abumrad]

If it's always getting jumbled up, one would think it would be hard to keep track of across time.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, but.

[Jad Abumrad]

And here's what you need to know for our next segment. There are patches of DNA which don't change. The Y chromosome is one of these places. This is the chromosome that men have that women don't have. And when a father has a son, he gives his son an exact copy of his Y chromosome, sort of like a Xerox machine. Then when, many years later, the boy has a boy of his own, same thing happens. And exactly copy of the Y on and on and on down the mail line. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Every so often, the cellular Xerox makes a mistake, a tiny mistake. Sort of like at work when you, you know, put the paper on the copier and the copy it spits back out at you has a little smudge on it, a little Speck. Maybe some dust got in there, who knows? It's not a big deal. I mean, you can still read the text. But this new smudgy copy is, in its way, unique. It's no longer just a copy because it's got that speck on it. This is where the analogy breaks down a bit. Granted, because a paper with a spec is not a very interesting thing, but a Y chromosome with a mutation is useful because geneticists can look at that little speck, that little mutation on the Y, and say that right there, that came from one man somewhere in time. It's a clue. And since they know that little mutation will get copied and copied and copied, they know that everyone else who shows up with it is descended from that man.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, this principle that a particular mutation on the Y chromosome comes from an individual back in time brings us to a wonderful story that I want to tell you. Once upon a time, a group of scientists led by this guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I am Spencer Wells, I'm a.

[Robert Krulwich]

Population geneticist, got into a Land Rover and headed off to Asia on what they call a blood sampling tour.

[Jad Abumrad]

We set off in April of 1998 on a six month odyssey. And it was literally four guys.

[Robert Krulwich]

It wasn't just four guys.

[Tatiana Zeria]

So my name is Tatiana Zeria. I'm an Italian researcher.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, she flew over for about three weeks.

[Tatiana Zeria]

I joined them in Tashkent.

[Jad Abumrad]

She came with us to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, taking samples in the Caucasus, in the.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mountains, the Altai Mountains, driving all over.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Central Asia, spending 10 hours in the car, going from place to place, sleeping, like in tents.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we sampled about a thousand people.

[Tatiana Zeria]

It was really an adventure.

[Robert Krulwich]

So here's what they do. Each village they'd come to, they'd find out who was in charge and then they'd sit down with him or describe.

[Tatiana Zeria]

The project in simple terms, basically make.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure that we had permission to do the sampling.

[Robert Krulwich]

They'd say to the chief, okay, we're here to tell your story, the history of your people, your family. Because by looking closely at the DNA in an ordinary blood sample, we can discover where your ancestors came from, where they went, who they conquered, who conquered them. And we can go back hundreds of generations.

[Jad Abumrad]

And typically, most people would willingly give us blood samples. What were they looking for exactly? Or I guess, what did they expect to find?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, this same group had done this in Europe, and when they did it in Europe, when they took blood from people, they found lots and lots of very distinct separate families with very separate ancestors.

[Jad Abumrad]

That makes sense.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what they were expecting to find in Asia, but that's not what they found in any case. Spencer gives Tatiana a batch of the DNA samples, almost 2,000 samples. She goes back to her lab in.

[Jad Abumrad]

London and the goal again was very kind of open ended. What are the genetic patterns in Central Asia?

[Robert Krulwich]

Tatiana gets all her DNA, lays it out and begins to investigate. And right away something's a little odd.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Very, very odd. I really thought to have made.

[Robert Krulwich]

In sample after sample after sample, she could see a specific mutation.

[Tatiana Zeria]

And we knew that everybody that present that mutation come from one individual sometimes.

[Robert Krulwich]

In the past, meaning all those modern Asian guys from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and Mongolia and China, people who came from very different ancient tribes and should have only the most distant family connections. Weirdly, they shared a fairly recent great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparent. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

[Tatiana Zeria]

No, never.

[Robert Krulwich]

She asked for her boss to come in.

[Dirk Obink]

I'm Chris Tyler Smith.

[Robert Krulwich]

And she showed him the data.

[Dirk Obink]

As soon as we saw that, we.

[Robert Krulwich]

Knew that that couldn't happen by chance alone. So the first thing she wanted to know was when did, when did this mysterious person, when did he live?

[Tatiana Zeria]

So using some statistical programs, she plugged.

[Robert Krulwich]

The data into a computer program and asked it to count backwards to the first moment when the mutation appeared.

[Tatiana Zeria]

And the program saved roughly 1,000 years.

[Robert Krulwich]

A thousand years ago, give or take 200 years, this person lived. Now, this is interesting. If you were alive a thousand years ago and you had a son, and that son had a son and so forth, you would have right now about 800 living descendants. This person, whoever he was, has right.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Now like 16 millions of men.

[Robert Krulwich]

16 million descendants?

[Tatiana Zeria]

Yeah. It's a lot.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, absolutely. Now here's where it gets interesting. Tatiana got herself a map.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Yeah, I had the map of the region spread on a map, the frequency.

[Robert Krulwich]

She began putting pins wherever she saw heavy concentrations of the mutation. She put a pin in Mongolia, China, Siberia, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan. And then she stood back and looked at this map. These pins spread all across Asia. And she thought, now wait a second.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Suddenly I realized that the spread of this lineage was perfectly matching the spread of the Mongol empire.

[Jad Abumrad]

As soon as she saw it, they went to Chris and Tatiana said, they.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Said to him, you know, Chris, I think I found Genghis Khan.

[Robert Krulwich]

Genghis Khan. Now that's pretty interesting.

[Tatiana Zeria]

I knew just what I studied when I was at high school, so I didn't really know much about it, but.

[Robert Krulwich]

She knew the basics. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan united the tribes of Mongol into a massive army, and they rode west, literally killing.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Thousands and thousands of men. So that means removing competitors. If you kill a man, you kill, in a sense, a chromosomal lineage.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then with all those men and their Y chromosomes out of the way, Genghis slept with a whole lot of ladies.

[Tatiana Zeria]

It's true. He. I believe he slept with many, many women.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what she read. Wild, fantastic tales, myths, really, of harems that numbered in the hundreds.

[Tatiana Zeria]

I mean, the stories, when they were getting into New village, he was the one picking up the youngest women and keeping them for himself.

[Morris Rasabi]

Genghis undoubtedly had a number of quite.

[Robert Krulwich]

A number of sexual partners. We wanted to just be a little careful here, so we called up an expert.

[Morris Rasabi]

Yeah, My name is Morris Rasabi, a.

[Robert Krulwich]

Professor of Mongolian history from Kol Columbia University. And arranged for breakfast. Can I get a couple of scrambled eggs?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

I have read accounts. I don't know how real they are. Where the Mongols would come in, conquer a territory, and there was a save the pretty ones for the boss kind of rule. Is that true at all?

[Morris Rasabi]

Yes, that's true. One story is that he was murdered by one of these women he had sex with, that she placed a knife in her vagina, and as they were having sex, he was stabbed and killed.

[Robert Krulwich]

Whether that's true or not, it's an interesting story. Whatever. If Genghis did have the power to command any woman he wanted, and if the dates were right for history and the places were right geographically, all the evidence points in the same direction.

[Jad Abumrad]

It looks like a duck and it.

[Dirk Obink]

Walks like a duck.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, the inference was that it was a duck.

[Dirk Obink]

This was Genghis Khan's Y chrom assembly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And so 23 scientists from all over the world together announced in the American Journal of Human Genetics that Genghis Khan was very, probably the most successful biological father in human history.

[Jad Abumrad]

In human history. Yes. Which in all of time.

[Robert Krulwich]

In all of time. And the thing about this story is it really, really. It caught people's attention. Cause this is one of those things where you can actually do something about it. You can take, you know, those DNA tests. Yeah, I just lost my earphones. I got so excited.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, I know. The DNA test, the swab your roast cheeks, put it in a vial, send.

[Robert Krulwich]

It back to these companies, and they send you. They could tell you whether you have Genghis Khan's marker.

[Jad Abumrad]

How much are these tests?

[Robert Krulwich]

How much? About not much. Well, I don't know. It depends. 300 bucks. 300 bucks.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's it? That's it for 300 bucks I can find out if I'm related to Genghis Khan. I bet I am.

[Robert Krulwich]

I bet you're not.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because his conquest routes ended sort of near Lebanon, where my folks are from.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean, come on, look, it's suckers like you who are perfect marks for businesses like this. We found this restaurant in London.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello, welcome to Shish. How are you this evening?

[Robert Krulwich]

Called Shish.

[Jad Abumrad]

Called. Called what?

[Laura Starcheski]

Shish.

[Robert Krulwich]

Shish, yeah, Shish. Because for short for Shish kebab. They announced a major Genghis Khan promotion.

[Jad Abumrad]

10 winners had DNA testing done in Oxford to find out if they were ancestors of Genghis Khan. This was very unique. And the response was just.

[Robert Krulwich]

People came, came immense. There were lines around the block, phone call, the phones were ringing all day.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, I never thought there would have been that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Interesting because after all, put this in your own mind, if you're sitting there thinking, well, if I'm related to Genghis Khan, that explains my extraordinary backhand. So you see, you weren't the only one. There were a lot of people working under strange illusions like you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Let me ask you this though. If I. Let's say I had taken the test and came up positive, I am so, it seems, related to Genghis Khan. Does that really mean anything definitively? I mean, is that marker for sure, Genghis Khan's marker? Do we know that?

[Robert Krulwich]

In fact, no. The only way you ever know for sure that it's anybody's mutation is you gotta go to the body, pluck some DNA from the body, see if it matches the mutation. So you gotta find Genghis Khan's body.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, that would be the ultimate proof.

[Robert Krulwich]

And by the way, there's a lot of people looking. Oh my God. Found a human skull buried in the ground. I have been doing this now for going on to eight and a half years and we've dug up with some very nice fellas so far. That guy is Maury Kravitz. This voice you hear is a direct result of screaming for years. He was a commodities trader in Chicago. Yeah, I was a warrior of the trading pits. He got just enough money, actually he made quite a bit of money to sponsor annual summer trips looking for Genghis Khan's corpse.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why is he looking for Genghis Khan?

[Robert Krulwich]

Valuables, great wealth. Because he knows that for all the sacking and pillaging that the Mongols did back in the 1200s, to this day, not one bejeweled dagger, not one necklace, not one diamond studded tiara which could be identified from the 13th century has ever surfaced, suggesting that it might be all under the surface of the ground somewhere, suggesting that it all went south with the old man. So there might be two treasures here. There's the physical treasure and the biological treasure. Well, that's for the scientists. I am a different sort of Genghis Khan man. But they're not going to be able to do a proper DNA search unless a guy like me finds a tomb. Mori says if there is a treasure, he will happily hand it over to the Mongolian government. But officials are a little weary, so he continues to plead his case. Can we excavate or can't we?

[Jad Abumrad]

Excavate?

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean, no? And he keeps digging up bodies, always with the same result. Well, it's not Genghis Khan. It's not Chinggis Khan. The problem is nobody knows where Genghis Khan is buried. They don't even know if he was buried. They don't even know if there's any place or thing to find it.

[Morris Rasabi]

Appears unlikely.

[Robert Krulwich]

Professor Rosabi says no, looking for Genghis is a. I don't know.

[Morris Rasabi]

He died in 1227.

[Robert Krulwich]

And they had no tradition of tomb culture at that point.

[Jad Abumrad]

The body was just left where it lay. So does that mean we'll never know?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, there may be a way out of this. Genghis Khan, he had a grandson, Kubla Khan, the famous emperor of China. Kubla has the same exact mutation that his grandpa had. That's the nature of this.

[Morris Rasabi]

And I think the more likely discovery.

[Jad Abumrad]

Will be of Kubla Khan's.

[Robert Krulwich]

Joan, why not look for Kubla? Where is Kubla Khan's body, would you guess? Well, we know it's stated in the.

[Morris Rasabi]

Sources that it's somewhere in Amia.

[Jad Abumrad]

When it is discovered, it'll be a real bonanza.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you talk to Maury ever? I mean, it seems to me you could get on the phone and say, you idiot, you're looking for the wrong guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, I.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, I'm going to cut you off. Morris Wasabi is going to say I'm looking for the wrong guy. You know, it's true. He happens that Kubla Khan is his pick. It's his pick because he wrote a book on Kubla Khan. Okay, okay. The point is, both Genghis and Kubla Khan have the same genetic marker. So if you find either one, either one will do. Pluck a hair from either guy's body, look up the DNA, and then you will know for sure if Genghis and his family not only conquered the ancient world, but. But Fathered the modern world. One day we will know. And I guess the neat thing about all of these tales is you think when you're going to tell a story from the past that the sensible place to go is you go to the library, you go to a fossil, you go to a ruin. But the truth is you can go anywhere. The blood coursing through your veins tells you, I have a story for you. Same with a little bit of garbage that sits next to an ancient shoe. You pluck the piece of paper and Jesus is talking to you. Literally. There are clues about the past everywhere. And if it's a knock on your door and you decide to open the door and take a look, who knows what you will find and who knows where you will go.

[Jad Abumrad]

By the way, the video clip used in that last segment was provided courtesy of A and E Networks. And for more information on anything you heard this hour, Visit our website, Radiolab.org.

[Robert Krulwich]

Communicate it with us while you're there. Here's our address.

[Jad Abumrad]

RadiolabNYC.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I are signing off.

[Robert Krulwich]

Thanks for listening.

[Tatiana Zeria]

Radiolab is produced by Jade Abumrad and Helen Horn, with help from Sarah Pellegrini, Melissa Kibo, Lulu Miller, Amber Sille. Sille. How do you pronounce that one? Amber Seeley, Casey Edwards and Jette. And special thanks to Sally Herships, the New York Department of Sanitation and Chief Diggings, Nica Bodice, Marina Cole, and to me, Tatiana Zweria, production management by Michael Elcessor, Edin Capello. Radiolab is produced by WNYC New York Public Radio and distributed by npr.

[Laura Starcheski]

Bye bye.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests. Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to 1 in 3Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we. The National Forest foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience and expanding recreation access for all. Last year, they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn more at nationalforests.org Radiolabs.

[Robert Krulwich]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

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