The massive skeleton... Of an ancient Lowcountry dweller...

Mysterious rings made out of seashells... And a vessel for an animal companion's journey to the afterlife.

I'm Andrew Davis.

I'm a history enthusiast with passions for exploring and finding cool objects from the past.

But for me?

It's even cooler to find artifacts with remarkable historical ties The Palmetto State shares a rich culture and I'm here to tell its stories through the mementos left behind.

Join me on this journey as we uncover some of these historical stories.

This is Curiosity Trek!

Did you know that South Carolina's low country was once inhabited by giant ground sloths millions of years ago?

Matthew Gibson: Typically as long as they're not feeling threatened, they're not much of a threat themselves.

But I mean, it's a large animal!

Maybe like an elephant or a bull, it certainly had the bulk to be able to take care of itself if it needed to.

Our first artifact is located in historic Downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

It takes about two hours to get there from Columbia.

But don't worry, I expended the gas so you don't have to!

Many examples of South Carolina's rich ecological history can be found housed inside the Charleston Museum - the oldest museum in the United States!

In its natural history exhibit, the remains of one animal in particular never fails to grab the attention of museum visitors.

This intimidating and massive looking skeleton once belonged to a mammal known as the Eremotherium Giant Ground Sloth.

The Eremotherium resided southern North America including South Carolina's Lowcountry between 5 million to 10,000 years ago!

Curator of natural history Matthew Gibson is joining us today to elucidate on the background of this ancient giant animal.

Now, generally speaking, why were animals back in those days so much larger than they are now?

So we actually see a trend when it comes to animal growth.

Over time, you'll see smaller animals evolving through time into larger forms, cutting off and then restarting.

A lot of that relates to specialization in a particular niche so as they become more adapted to that sort of role in the environment, they become more successful, meaning they can invest more of their energy into growth.

Now, as you specialize, you become dependent on whatever resources you're working with so that's why we also see mass extinctions happening.

They become so specialized that if their habitat changes even a little, you have a massive die off.

For animals to get as large as this, there has to be ample resources, and mammals, for the most part, are more comfortable in temperate, cooler environments so we can make inferences about how readily available resources were as well as just overall climate in the area.

Ground sloths in South Carolina are found in a couple of different layers, mainly because they're intermingled with other fossils.

There are a lot of erosional features that we have to deal with in the low country: hurricanes and things of that matter.

So when they intermingle them, we have to basically come up with time periods by looking at fossils from other places in North America.

Our Eremotherium is most likely Rancho La Brean in age because the sediment layers that do contain Ice Age fossils in this area are the same animals you find in La Brean tar pits like direwolves, bison, mammoths and mastodons.

Are there other species of giant sloth around at this time?

There's a couple different ones: There's Megalonyx as well as Mylodon and Paramylodon.

They fulfill different niches in their environment than the giant ground sloth does.

Most of them are moderately sized animals- think around the size of like an American black bear, maybe a little bit bigger.

But there were different feeding habits for those so some of them grazed, some of them exclusively ate leaves, but they didn't have the height range of the giant ground sloth so they were able to coexist.

Host: In order for Eremotheriums to maintain their massive size and strength, they required a lot of food consumption!

How did they achieve this?

Gibson: Well, when it comes to diet the first thing we look at is the teeth.

So giant ground sloths have high crowned teeth, meaning they ate a variety of plants, grasses, leaves, twigs, things like that.

And we can look at some of the hindquarters.

So how compressed and thick the legs are and the tail, they let us know that this thing most likely could rear up.

So it was eating things from like the tops of trees and stuff where other animals were more grazers.

So it fulfilled kind of a specialized niche; it didn't have a whole lot of competition.

And you could see with those really long limbs, it had a wide reaching range.

Eremotherium is thought to be somewhere around three tons.

For reference, a full grown elephant can be around seven tons.

These animals would have had to be able to move through forested environments, meaning you're going to have to push some trees out of your way.

They're just too big to walk through too crowded of areas.

So it's a good idea to just kind of think of them like solitary elephants moving through a forest.

Host: The Eremotherium needed some hefty digits to properly grip and bring down large tree limbs.

That's where its most distinguishing feature, its claws come into focus!

Gibson: Most likely, they were primarily used for stripping branches of their leaves.

However, there have been burrows found in South America, so we know ground sloths potentially did burrow.

Most likely not here, instead if Eremotherium was using them for something else, maybe digging to get to roots and things like that, just to access other plant food options.

Host: Despite the Eremotherium being an herbivore, it surprisingly had very few natural predators.

Gibson: It's one of the largest herbivorous animals that would have lived in its range, so the number of predators that would have hunted this thing are probably pretty low.

But Direwolves, which are a well-known ice age mammal, would have most likely fed on young as well as older sick individuals.

But I mean, it's a large animal!

Maybe like an elephant or a bull, It certainly had the bulk to be able to take care of itself if it needed to.

Host: Unlike the species of sloths found today, these ancient ground sloths were quite different from their present day counterparts!

Gibson: Ground sloths are obviously more robust.

They don't have to live that arboreal tree lifestyle, so their bones tend to be a lot thicker and bulkier.

However, the similarities some of the most easiest ones to identify are in the forelimbs: So just like our modern tree sloths, they have those really long grasping forelimbs.

Now, tree sloths use it obviously to climb, whereas ground sloths are using this to bring the plant food to them.

They also have a very similar shoulder blade.

It's something they share amongst all Xenarthrans, which is an animal group containing armadillos, giant anteaters, as well as the modern tree sloth.

I mean, they weren't fast animals for sure, but they are herbivores, so they didn't have to move very fast.

The best analog would just be like some slow herbivorous grazing animals that's kind of the speed you're looking at.

Whereas tree sloths are climbing up into areas where they're attempting to hide in camouflage.

So their low, slow metabolism is probably pretty different than our ground sloths.

Host: The last of these ground sloths disappeared forever around 10,000 years ago.

What vicissitudes led to its extinction?

Gibson: Toward the latter end of the Ice Age, sea levels started to rise as glaciers melt.

So most Ice Age mammals were pressured pretty heavily as their habitats were lost.

Now there are examples of Eremotherium and other ground sloths being hunted toward the end of their time period in South America, but we have not found any examples of that here.

Could you please elaborate on the process of what it takes to preserve a fossil such as this one?

So when we locate a large fossil in the field or any fossil in general we tend to cover it in a plaster jacket taking the fossil as well as some of the surrounding sediment with it so we can bring it back to the lab to work on it.

And then it just comes down to months, maybe even years of just slowly removing that sediment and taking the fossil from its original layer.

Once when you're able to do that, there may be some reconstruction that has to be done.

We use a specialized poly-vinyl plastic that we coat the specimens with as well as glue them back together.

That's also why a lot of fossils in museums tend to have that sort of plastic-y sheen; they have been coated into that for preservation.

Host: We hope you enjoyed becoming more familiar with the story behind the Charleston Museum's Eremotherium sloth.

Now that we've learned a little bit more about it, perhaps you can channel your inner sloth and reach maximum relaxation if you get to see this skeleton up close!

This next set of artifacts is located just off the coast of Edisto, SC.

From Charleston, it's just over an hour away.

Anyone who has flown over the Edisto area of South Carolina may have looked down and noticed these unusual ring shaped structures and the marshes below.

What are they exactly?

How did they get here?

Who put them there?

According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources this ring complex was constructed by Native Americans around 4,300 years ago!

The remains of ancient civilizations such as these dot South Carolina's coastline.

Edisto in the Lowcountry is the home to three unique ring structures.

This particular cluster is called Fig Island.

But what are they?

We're going to dig a little deeper into the history of these shell rings!

But unlike the Eremotherium skeleton which is nestled inside a cozy, air-conditioned museum...

These shell rings are out in the elements and they are not accessible to the public.

So we needed a little help from the SC Department of Natural Resources to get there Upon our arrival, we embarked on a 15 minute boat ride out to Fig Island.

Even after our boat landed, the journey wasn't over yet.

To see these rings up close, we had to make our way through a lightly wooded maritime forest environment.

Like a scene straight out of an adventure movie we weaved through vines, avoiding various species of spiders.

With the help of Sean Taylor, Senior Archaeologist for the SC Department of Natural Resources we arrived at our destination.

These shell rings, what are they?

That's a good question.

We don't know.

We don't know if they're ceremonial centers we don't know if they're habitation centers we don't know what their purpose were.

There's 20... More than 26 of them on our coast.

Just a few miles of here, there are several.

There are three rings here at Fig.

Fig 1, 2, and 3.

Fig 3 is a crescent.

Figure 2 is a hexagon shape And Fig 1 is a series of rings that make up a big complex.

There's a historic map that has the words which look like"Pig Island", actually so I think Fig Island is a... Somebody transcribed it erroneously perhaps sometime in the 19th century.

They're made up of oysters and tons of other shellfish.

Every shellfish species you can think of through excavation, we will recover from each ring.

It doesn't seem to be a big difference in species diversity between rings.

The wonderful thing about the shellfish is it's allowed for the preservation of a lot of other stuff.

The flora and fauna remains that we get and shell rings are really incredible.

That's something that we don't get on other sites.

Rings primarily tell us about their food ways; what kind of resources they're collecting from the natural world, and they're eating everything that moves, swims or flies, and things that don't move.

Now, similar structures have been found off the coasts of Georgia and Florida... Could you kind of compare the rings found here to the ones found in states further down from us?

Our rings in South Carolina tend to be circular or crescent in shape and tend to be about 200 to 300 feet in diameter.

Some of them are very low, and we think that probably has to do a lot with agricultural practices in the 19th century when they were farmed.

Raw oyster shell was used as a building material for Tabby.

We see that happening a lot so we think that some of the rings have been depleted in that way.

So you get rings that are only a foot or two in height and unlike Fig here, which doesn't appear to that to ever happen, Fig 2 is about 6 to 7 feet in height and 250 or so feet in diameter.

Rings on the Florida Georgia coast, the north Georgia coast look a lot like the rings in South Carolina.

They're circular in shape and similar in size- some small, some of them bigger.

But as you move south along the Georgia coast they become more amorphous in shape and they look more like the ones in Florida which are often really very large much, much larger in size and oval in shape.

The Fig Island Ring Complex is around 4,300 years old in age.

To compare that with other famous landmarks they're about the same age as Stonehenge in England or the 3 Ancient Egyptian pyramids of Giza!

Now, out of all the materials available to these Native Americans, why did they pick oysters, of all things?

I think it's their abundance in the natural world they're just so abundant.

Then we've looked at historic maps to see how abundant our historic oyster beds were and we see that we don't have the oyster populations today that were here even 200 years ago and much less 4000 years ago.

So they were just here for the taking.

In order to build a massive shell ring it would take millions of oysters consumed over a long period of time!

Thankfully, when you have a whole village of people all eating the same food, it doesn't take near as long to accumulate the number of shells to build a ring like this.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to come out here and share these fascinating facts, Sean!

Absolutely any time I've enjoyed the day.

Although some unanswered questions remain about the true purposes of these rings, perhaps further archaeological studies will reveal more clues as to why exactly these rings were built.

On my previous visit to the Charleston Museum something else of unusual significance caught my eye.

An artifact from a completely different ancient civilization made its way to South Carolina... How would you like your favorite animal companions to come with you into the afterlife?

For ancient Egyptians, they could!

John Fisher: They have some examples where the cat was important to a pharaoh and pharaoh wanted that cat to accompany him into the afterlife.

Animals were treated almost just as well as humans and considered to be the essential other beings, not just pets!

Ah...

Ancient Egypt.

What do you think of when you hear the name "Egypt"?

Pyramids?

Pharaohs?

The Sphinx?

What about mummies?

In the 19th century, Europe and the United States experienced a phenomenon called "Egyptomania".

Ancient Egyptian culture was all the rage, and folks sought to collect items for both academic study... As well as bragging rights.

South Carolina was not spared from this craze.

An impressive assortment of ancient Egyptian artifacts can be found in the Dr. Gabriel Manigault collection.

This feline shaped bronze case is one of many examples that ancient Egyptians loved animals much like we do today.

So much so that animals would accompany the deceased into the spirit realm.

This hollow cat statue we're about to see was constructed sometime between 332 B.C.

and 30 A.D. To help us dig up the history on this ancient Egyptian relic, we found the perfect man to talk to!

My name is John Fisher.

I'm the curator of archeology at the Charleston Museum.

Can you tell us who originally found this case and around when and where was it found?

We don't actually know a lot about where it was specifically found.

We do know that it was donated by a Mr. Archer Huntington in 1931.

But this was part of a popular trend from the late 19th century to the 1920s, where people were paying people like Sir Flinders Petrie, who we have a lot of objects in the museum from to add to their museum collections and or personal collections.

This is made out of bronze, which is a copper alloy, and so copper and bronze were extremely significant during this time period.

All sorts of things were made out of it.

Cats and a lot of the mummified creatures basically from about the Ptolemaic era, which is around 300 BCE kind of in the Hellenistic period for Egypt began.

Could you elaborate a little bit on who Gabriel Manigault was and how did he amass this massive collection?

Right, so actually there are two famous Gabriel Manigaults.

One being Gabriel Manigault from the 18th century who was a famous architect in the Charleston area and did a lot of really important works.

But then there's also Dr. Gabriel Manigault who was the curator and director of the Charleston Museum in the late 19th century and he specifically was interested in skeletal anatomy and acquiring a wider range of things for the museum and so we had some things donated to us from the Egyptian consulate that he either received or purchased to build this Egyptian museum collection.

Host: The ancient Egyptians took the afterlife seriously and great pains were taken to prepare the dead for their respective journeys into the spirit world.

Fisher: Mummifying a body for the ancient Egyptians was an extremely important ritual.

It's usually reserved for the more wealthy or people who were more significant like the pharaohs, everybody's of course, familiar with.

But it would take up to 70 days.

This would include a process where you would salt the body, which would help to dry out the skin.

You would also remove certain internal organs which were put into certain vases so that your internal organs could accompany you into the afterlife.

And certain areas would be filled with linen or sometimes covered with jewels or other things, and then you would be wrapped in linen.

And so basically starting from individual fingers and toes and wrapping the entire body and coating it in a resin.

Could you go into a little bit more detail about the gods and goddesses specifically linked with death and the afterlife?

For the Egyptian afterlife and the underworld specifically you have Osiris who is the god of the underworld, you have Isis who is his wife, Anubis, kind of one of the more famous ones who was basically the person who helped Osiris judge you after you went into the afterlife.

And you have Thoth... And Osiris even at one point was murdered and resurrected and Anubis was believed to help embalm him.

Host: The dead did not wish to live in the afterlife alone or empty handed.

As evidenced by this bronze cat case, ancient Egyptians believed animal companions traveled into the spirit realm alongside their owners!

Fisher: With mummies, it's actually believed that those belongings could accompany you in the afterlife and make your life just as enjoyable as it was during life, and especially with animals because animals were treated almost just as well as humans and considered to be essential other beings, not just pets.

Other civilizations such as Mesopotamia, you had Ur, in China you had the Shang Dynasty and they also believed that things could kind of accompany you into the afterlife, along with individuals.

So kings, rulers at this exact same time period would even have servants that would accompany them into the afterlife and be able to serve them.

Also you would have belongings that would be offered to the gods to help ferry you into the afterlife.

Host: Ancient Egyptians revered animals.

They held strong ties with the gods, and in many respects, animals were treated just as well as people!

Why were cats so important in ancient Egyptian culture?

So cats have always been important in ancient Egyptian culture.

They go back as far as some pharaohs wanting to be buried with their cat because the cat was significant to them during life.

But later on, during the Ptolemaic period, a lot of cults developed which were worshiping specific gods.

So with the cat: Bastet and Sekhmet.

Everybody is familiar with the Sphinx, and the Sphinx kind of largely ties to Sekhmet.

And putting one's face on top of that might mean that you're more significant because you're tying yourself to the god.

But with animal burials in particular, it's tying it to the cults and the specific gods and gods you worshiped.

Originally, they thought that a lot of these animals meant a lot to the pharaohs; that they had certain powers and the rest.

And they did mean a lot.

They meant a lot in life.

But later during that Ptolemaic period when there were those cults and they were trying to worship and sacrifice to the specific gods like Bastet, the goddess that looked like the domestic cat.

This became a much more common practice.

You get everything from baboons to ibis to shrews to crocodiles, and you see this throughout the time period.

You do see a rise and decline in popularity.

But especially during this Ptolemaic period, you get a wide range of animals that are seen in tombs, especially next to specific temple sites.

Now, one distinguishing feature I noticed on this case is that it has a more human-like nose right here.

Could you tell our viewers a little bit as to why human characteristics were given to animals in ancient Egyptian art and architecture?

That's a very good observation.

Unfortunately, in this case, it just happens to be the way it was constructed and a lot of times it had to be made a certain way to be able to fit the mummy.

And so sometimes you end up with certain features that look a little more human-like, just for the sake of the construction or the artist who made it.

But in ancient Egyptian culture, that was actually really significant for you to be able to have your likeness put onto something like that of a God.

So, for instance, the Sphinx was actually a pharaoh's face put on top of Sekhmet- one of the really, really well-known lion-like gods.

And this happens throughout the iconography in the hieroglyphs as well.

Host: Now, do we know what happened to the cat originally inside this case?

Fisher: Unfortunately, we do not.

But it could have originally contained a cat.

And actually, now that they've been doing a lot more CT scanning and X-ray scanning of all of these mummies, they found a lot of times people really wanted a cat to go in to the afterlife with them.

But a lot of times people had what they had so you may not even have a mummy inside of a cat case.

So a lot of times you would get a really nice bronze cat case like this and it might not even contain a mummy, might contain a different creature altogether!

It just depended on the level of control you had and hopefully trusting your priest to put in the right thing.

One of the things that I suggest people to always do is do a lot of research.

There are mummified cats everywhere, but aren't that many cat statues out there.

A lot of the cat statues have piercings, have nose piercings, ear piercings.

And those can tell us a little more when we look at the iconography to see who it might be tied to.

What was the purpose?

What time period is it from?

Because the faces change, the art changes based on the popularity and certain forms of the time.

Host: For the ancient Egyptians, as well as today's animal lovers it can be a comforting thought knowing that we won't be alone when passing over into the great unknown.

If you enjoyed learning about the Charleston Museum's mummified cat case perhaps we could "purrsuade" you to make the trip down to the Charleston Museum to see this statue for yourself.

Fear not, fellow viewers!

This journey may be coming to a close but it is just the beginning of what all South Carolina has to offer when it comes to the mementos left behind by the cultures and people who helped shape our state's history.

I'm Andrew Davis.

Thank you for joining me on Curiosity Trek!

Until next time!