deathmtn

More than 300 years later, the tens of thousands of bodies in the crypt are providing scientists with a remarkable record of the poor in 17th century Milan.

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Eventually, Tagliabue realized she had something unusual under her microscope—and that researchers had the story of the sepulchers precisely reversed. “The answer is no, it’s not soil,” she says. Instead, the blackish substance was almost entirely made up of human flesh, with a light sprinkling of brick dust and microscopic bone fragments.