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ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE

A film by Joerg Burger

- This is from the time... - The colours.

Wow. Yes.

- This is ... - Incredible.

the coloured version, which has been produced 30 years after Frauenfeld's death.

- Did he use a true-to-life colour range? - He did.

Really? Fantastic. At least until 1860.

- And the bird is already extinct. - Yes.

It's a certain type.

So, these sketches and their colours correspond to this?

Exactly. And Zimmermann added these nice landscape details to the drawing.

The colouring is absolutely exquisite.

- What a great contribution to an exhibition. - Yes.

- Oh, hi! - Hello. We have an appointment.

- Do we? - And this is our treasure.

I've brought Nathalie along,

- so she can clean up the parrot a little bit. - Okay. What have we got here?

It's one of our precious objects

- from Emperor Franz's menagerie. - Okay.

It's a historic specimen.

I think it was given to the museum in 1832.

It's extraordinary because there are only 19 or 20 of these specimens worldwide.

There is one from 1760

in Schönbrunn Zoo.

A specimen that was sent to Europe back then.

- Okay. I'm done. - Perfect.

A bit higher...

I'd say 33.5.

Our museum is the second largest research facility in Austria.

Our collections here are quite extraordinary.

We conduct basic research in all fields, everything that is out there

and also in space.

For me, the Naturhistorisches Museum is a very special place

for very different reasons.

First of all because it's the first and in fact the only

and the most beautiful museum of evolution in Europe.

Even though very Catholic, the Habsburgers established

research in the theory of evolution in all departments here.

Not only the collections and exhibitions, but also the building as an artistic synthesis

reflects the basic idea of evolution,

that humankind is part of this larger process.

You can see it in the ceiling paintings in the grand staircase,

depicting the human ephemerality and the competition among living things.

Various evolutive processes are presented here

and this makes our house unique.

We also cover prehistory here,

which means that we engage in the human-nature relationship.

And this not only includes natural sciences,

but also human sciences.

When dealing with nature and its meaning for humans, the humanities,

which deal with essential questions and issues of meanings,

play an important role.

I've got the inventory register here.

I think our colleague wants 12-4-58, the griseus.

- Is it the right specimen? - Correct. Yes.

- Good. We need to take a DNA sample. - Okay.

- Has Alice already taken the photos? - Yes.

It's already cut open, so it's perfect to take samples without...

It's quite an old specimen, but I think we'll find a small piece of DNA

to figure out if it is really this species, a desert monitor.

- Maybe a piece from its muscle? - A piece of an inner muscle.

I just check what we've got here. Yes.

We can take a piece from its abdominal wall.

Perfect.

We got it.

I think that'll be enough. Let's label it.

Done. Now we can send it to our colleague.

The research projects we carry out

are basically very similar to the projects in all the other scientific departments here.

It's always about evolution, systematics and taxonomy.

Here, we apply another method in addition to morphology and ecology.

We do DNA analyses.

We compare DNA sequences. Based on the findings, we try to reconstruct the genealogy,

or determine evolution traits.

So these are research projects based on research questions.

Another very extensive project we are carrying out here

is the ABOL project, Austrian Barcode of Life.

The aim is to inventory biodiversity.

So there is no overarching set of questions.

What this project is about is characterising species genetically

by using DNA barcodes,

That means all species that exist in Austria, be it animals, plants or fungi.

It seems that applied research is considered more important than basic research.

For many people,

the only raison d'être for basic research is

its potential usefulness to applied research,

when it can be used as a basis so to speak.

It's often overlooked that basic research is important and has a justification

in its own right.

Specifically the kind of basic research we pursue here

very often has no immediate application.

Exploring the distinctions among species,

finding out how species have evolved in the course of time,

is part of our studies in the field of palaeontology.

All this research has no immediate and also usually

no use in the medium term such as:

"we can make some money with it"

or "we can develop something".

This kind of research is solely for the advancement of knowledge.

You simply can't predict where and when what kind of knowledge will be useful.

But that doesn't mean that it's not valuable and important now.

This fact is very often ignored.

I like this one much better.

It's more dynamic and

- much higher, so people can't touch it easily. - Right.

In this 1:20 scale model, the visitor would be 8 centimetres high,

and they can't touch it.

You're not really convinced by my reconstruction.

Well, I just think it might be standing too upright.

The latest state of research assumes

that the long axis should be more horizontal.

Now, with its tail going down, it looks a bit like a kangaroo.

I think it'd better if the tail was a bit higher.

I have no problem with raising the tail.

Actually, it's better because it's out of reach of the visitors.

I'd like to have a bit of movement in its posture,

otherwise it just stands there limply.

Sure, you can raise its head a bit, but the tail shouldn't go down too much,

otherwise it's like earlier reconstructions, which, as we now know, were inaccurate.

Push it head-first. Careful, a bit lower.

Watch out, the foot...

I've got it.

- You've got its hand? - Yes.

I just change my grip.

Careful. Does it fit there?

Okay.

Basically,

the large museums of natural history

are spatiotemporal archives of biodiversity.

They allow us to travel back in time and take a look

at the morphological and also genetic diversity

of endangered species before they became so rare.

So we can see how the genetic diversity has declined over time,

concomitant with the loss of habitat

and also decreasing populations.

This one is a very special specimen: it's a bluebuck.

It's the first large mammal that was hunted to extinction in Africa.

We don't know exactly,

but the last ones were probably hunted in 1799 or 1800.

This one is so special because

there are only four preserved specimens on exhibit worldwide

and this one is the only female.

There are also two antlers somewhere. This year,

we published a paper on our genetic analysis of the last remaining specimens

compared to those considered to be bluebucks until recently.

It is still possible to sample DNA from these specimens.

I extracted a piece of skin from between its hooves

and so we were able

to bring back to life an extinct animal, as it were.

Look, here are a couple of ribs. They go into the gaps.

Okay.

- Have I got this right? - Let me see.

- This is the upper part. - Okay.

- We have to turn this one around, too. - Yes.

It's pretty heavy.

How old is the dinosaur I'm photographing here?

This one is a Plateosaurus

and is approximately between 220 and 210 million years old.

It lived during the Late Triassic period.

- Is it an original? - Yes, this is an original.

We're quite proud of it, because we didn't have one until now.

This is our first original dinosaur. All other exhibits we have here are replicas.

Look, a broken rib. We have to mend it.

- Yes. - They break so easily.

The bones are very fragile and break very, very easily.

So,

this probably won't be the last one we'll have to glue back together.

And how do you know what they look like?

- Or rather looked like? - Well,

we know about the anatomy, the bone structure,

because there are complete skeletons of them. There are quite a few actually.

And in recent research, 3D scans of the bones were made

to create digital replica, and so we know pretty well what it looked like.

Until a few decades ago, the assumption was that it walked on four legs.

But today, we rather believe that it ran on its hind limbs

and bent down to use its arms for feeding and grazing.

This is curious.

I've been doing this for 25 years now,

working as a volunteer

in the museum, because it's fun

and I learn a lot.

And it's like some kind of meditation

sitting here all day, tapping

and emptying out the sands.

There are tiny fossils in these sands and they're my favourites.

I examine these carefully

and sort them by types and species,

so the scientists don't have to

go through the whole batch.

But as I suffer from vertigo now,

I need walking canes, and my husband

as my second cane, stabilising me.

For example, today was quite windy and it almost knocked me over.

I have a balance problem,

but I can still sit and work.

My reasoning was,

now that the State is taking care of me,

paying me a pension,

the least I could do in exchange

was to do volunteer work.

The agency for volunteer work helped me find this job at the museum.

I've been here for 20 years now

and I still love it.

The first time I came into this museum, it was a funny feeling.

When I went in

it felt like the old Emperor might suddenly come around the corner.

And it smelled kind of old here, of old paper.

I found it fascinating.

So, I started here.

They trained me how do this and well,

I liked it.

This is how I try to make a small contribution

by helping them here

to get their work going.

The problem with basic research is: you're always under pressure to justify your work.

And we always avoid saying

this research is good for this or that,

but rather that non-directional research is what we need.

It's done for the sake of research itself,

because if research is always conducted with a specific purpose,

it'll become quite narrow at some point.

And you never know what the knowledge you gain is or will be good for.

It's true, that there is very little money available for sciences,

but we have to deal with a very peculiar problem here in our house:

our collections not only provide

the evidence and the basis for scientific work

but also the documentation thereof.

And this aspect is always totally ignored.

With a research project at a university,

you can raise external funds and publish the results in high-ranking journals,

so it's always easier to raise the money.

If you want to raise funds for a scientific collection like ours,

they ask you: What are you going to do with the material?

I'd say, maybe someone comes by in the next hundred years.

Well, that doesn't make it easy to raise funds.

And the problem is ...

that we need reasonable funds

to work through the backlog.

I mean, I wouldn't say it's a Sisyphean task,

but no matter how hard I work, no matter how much effort I put into my work,

I'll never be done.

We all feel this way here.

It's quite frustrating.

Now, the advent of digitalisation gives us new hope.

The thing is, this collection has been growing for more than 200 years now,

and we still don't know exactly what we've got here.

But we need to provide that information now with the current biodiversity crisis

so that it can be used for research and so on.

So we need money to at least inventory what we've got.

You can only prioritise what you want to look into

if you know what is available.

And it's our great hope that things finally get moving.

That's what Heimo has been trying to achieve the past 20 years.

Just to give you an idea of the dimension:

So far, we've only got 10 % done. Until recently, we believed it was even less.

We've got 16,000 plant names on our cards.

So, it's an endless task.

We're preparing a taxonomic catalogue,

because we actually don't know for which names,

for which species, we've got material here.

We simply don't know. Every time there's a request,

we have to go searching.

We ask one another where it might be, or if it's filed under a different name.

Because things have been moved around, or have been filed but placed somewhere else,

and no one kept record of where they put the material.

Or an expert showed up and said, "What you have written on the card is wrong"

He corrected it, so that material goes under a different name,

but no one has kept record. So it'll be difficult to find it ever again.

We explained all these problems to the management,

and how insane the whole situation is, how much time we waste here.

This is something the business people also understand.

It's insane how much of our highly paid, well,

let's just say our paid labour ...

is wasted on looking for things.

Or on running back and forth. A colleague brought a step counter one day

and counted six kilometres of running up and down the attic, again and again.

- You do that every day for 20 or 30 years. - Exactly.

Just imagine how many kilometres you make here just looking for material.

Here on this screen we can see the signal

of the radar antenna that we have on the roof.

On the roof of the museum we have a camera to visually detect fireballs

and an antenna to detect the signals of cosmic dust

from larger bodies entering the atmosphere.

This rock was formed on the moon and during a big impact event on there,

during the excavation process,

some rocks were ejected from the gravity of the moon

orbiting in the solar system and at some point entering the atmosphere of the earth,

surviving the atmospheric entry and landing on the ground.

By looking at the different mineral and composition, we better understand

what the moon is made of, the history of the moon

and recently in another meteorite from the moon,

we have discovered a new mineral unknown on earth

that tells us much more about our own earth.

That is why by looking at some meteorite rocks from other planetary body,

we can even better learn about our own planet.

Okay. The whole one.

A bit more.

You got it down already.

Is it sitting on it? Almost.

But is it in the joint? I guess, I can open a surgery...

- A chiropractic surgery? - For elephants.

I don't think so. We have to lift it on top this.

A bit back and then we mount it onto the leg.

We have to connect it to this leg from below. Okay.

- Are you okay - Yes, it's connected back here, too.

- But we need to get in here. - We have to get it on this somehow.

So we have to lift it higher.

I can't see anything. Hold on.

Wait.

Stop, stop, stop. I can't grab it.

How about there? Is it already...

- Great. - Is your part at the height of its hip?

- Let's disconnect this again. - Maybe this is the wrong side of the joint.

We have to move it to the front and take the load from the hip.

So, what's the plan? Are we putting it down?

We need to start again, so bring it down.

- Okay? Gerhard, standing steady? - Yes, I'm standing securely.

Okay. Let's get in down here. Move towards me.

What's your plan?

- We have to mount it back there, right? - Yes, that'd be great, but...

- Shit, this fellow is heavy. - This looks good.

- I'm too short for this. - Going well!

- Now let it down. - Okay, letting it down.

- So. - Push it to the back.

- Careful with your hand! - How much?

Wait. It think that's enough.

Where are we? Can you see it?

Yes... No, not quite...

- Hold on. It's totally twisted. - Now you can fix it. I'm holding the hip.

- This has to go further up. - A bit more. Push down the nail a bit.

- Almost... - A bit more.

- Got it. Now, that's good. - Okay. It's fixed.

Okay.

- Now. - A bit more.

Okay, just leave it now.-

The jaw is too low. Or protrudes...

- How is it now? - Better. Can you hold it?

- No, it's not quite right yet. - Okay.

- It'll stay like this. - Yes.

I'd say this is probably how he...

- Right. - This photo is great.

This is probably how he stored the skulls in his apartment...

Crazy.

Here, another one. It is this way up?

Like this.

That's how he stored them at home.

- I guess at some point he ran out of space. - Well, of course.

I mean keeping the skull of an elephant at home...

- Is that a Latimeria? It is. - Wow, amazing.

It's the whole fish, not just it's skeleton.

Right. And he photographed it before he dissected it.

I think he owned the first Latimeria in Austria.

- Here he is in a hospital. Here it is again. - Yes, this is a smaller Latimeria.

Already dissected!

So he made pictures of the fish before and after the dissection.

It will be a lot of work to scan all these papers.

Look, here's Zwilling!

- Ernst Zwilling, the big-game hunter. - This is amazing!

This is probably about big-game hunting, in Uganda.

"Last Sunday I returned to Vienna from a four-month safari in Uganda."

Did he buy from him? No. This is interesting.

It'll be very valuable for the archive to record this.

Is this customs records? No, it's a price list.

It seems that he also bought skulls.

So, he didn't dissect everything himself, he also bought skulls.

"Nature products, teaching materials". He's from Hamburg, Flemming.

And he also sold skulls. This is interesting.

Skulls. Obviously he had an entry on each skull.

He took down a record.

He examined each skull morphologically

and took down everything he noticed.

We've got the elephant quite nicely. It's finished now.

Yes, it turned out really nice. Is it from the Schönbrunn Zoo, too?

No, it's not from Schönbrunn.

It was shot in Africa in the early 1970s by my predecessor.

He went to Africa on a work trip, shot the elephant,

skinned it and had the skin that weighted 800 kilograms

transported back to Vienna in one piece. Then they tanned it here.

But they didn't have time to dissect it,

so they just left it outside in the winter, where it began to putrefy.

As a result, the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, peeled off

and was replaced by synthetic material.

Now, after 30 years that started to disintegrate as well

and needed to be restored.

But the skin looks really natural.

Is any part of this animal still original?

- I mean, from the original elephant. - Not much.

The head and the trunk and the feet.

The legs, the entire belly and the back are synthetic skin.

And he didn't get the tusks. He wasn't allowed to export them.

So he made plaster casts of them there and had the replica built here.

These tusks are made of some kind of polyester.

And in the course of the restorations, we repainted them.

You've done a great job!

In addition to exploring our scientific collections,

we also do fieldwork.

We try to add to our collections, we gather data in open terrain.

We go on field trips in Austria and abroad

in order to collect data for our scientific publications.

Wow, look!

Oh yes. Thanks.

We need to put on gloves 'cause of the fungi. Yes, everyone.

It's in a good condition.

Let's take its temperature first.

Come here.

Yes, yes, I know this is not pleasant.

Yes, yes, yes.

Okay.

Let's check for lesions now.

- Everything's fine. - Looks really good.

Yes... Sorry.

- Looks very good. - Yes, there's nothing at all.

- The belly side looks so pretty. - Beautiful pattern.

- This one's a beauty. It starts smelling now. - Yes, totally!

- I'm glad we're wearing gloves. - Okay...

- That's it. Need a hand? - I've got it.

- Thanks. - Oh, look!

There we go again.

- Yes, it starts again. - It reeks!

Okay, we've got everything.

- No lesions. - Okay then, thanks.

Gele is going to check if the snakes are infected with fungi.

- But this one looks quite healthy. - Yes, totally healthy.

You can perfectly see the agate.

Parts of it are calcedony.

Very nice banding in the pockets. Very nice.

That's what I wanted to see.

Super.

Very good. We've got another one.

Fantastic.

Here are the bubbles. Here are the bubbles I wanted to see.

The great thing about museums of natural history is

that they have collected natural materials over centuries.

Partly due to the private connections of the curators

and partly through expeditions.

The Vienna imperial house sent expeditions out

into the world to collect and bring back things

that couldn't to be found anywhere else and in such abundance.

And because of this

our collections here are still world-famous and renowned today.

But sadly, in the past two decades

we had a sharp decline in funds

so that we are no longer able to expand our collections

as we did in the early 1990s.

When I started working here, mineral dealers would come here frequently

and offer us their finest and rarest items.

We could pick and choose.

They came to us even before they went to retailers or the mineral exchange auctions

and let us choose from their finest pieces,

because it made them proud that their minerals

would be part of our collections and exhibited in our museum.

But now we basically have no budget for acquisition

and can no longer compete with museums in America or Canada

that continue to make purchases.

Our museum is losing its significance.

And that this coincides

with the end of my own career makes me very sad.

Our budget has dropped so rapidly and so much

that we can only afford to buy peanuts.

And later on, this gap can no longer be filled.

Here's another one.

Okay.

That one stays empty.

We don't want to hide anything from our visitors,

but we try to recreate the 3D prints

as accurately as possible and with colour.

You can see it here. This one is an original vertebra

and there are the already coloured 3D prints.

This is three millimetres too high.

Okay, that's it.

Great.

Okay.

Could you mount the front limbs for me? I haven't seen them yet.

Yes.

And you've added the metacarpal bones here?

- Good idea. Great. - Yes, we glued them. You can't see it.

Which screw goes here? Obviously not this one.

- Do you like the position of the hand? - Yes.

Here, we've got the fingers...

- The bones... - The carpal bones.

The carpal bones are all in line. We can maybe twist here a bit.

Yes, just turn it here a little so that the hand is tilted inward a bit more.

- Now it looks like a dinosaur, doesn't it? - Yes.

- That took quite a while. - I bet it did.

It's not easy to get all the angles right.

But now, the way it's standing there, that's pretty much the current state of the art.

- Fine. - Well, that might change next year.

Probably not so soon, but...

- According to the latest findings... - I was there when one of these was assembled.

This was five, no 20 years ago. Back then its tail was on the floor.

Okay, I see.

- Wait. - Right.

I think this is the fourth year we're doing our burning experiments.

It's essential that we have a series.

That's the only way we can obtain really valid data.

The archaeological background are

the Late Bronze Age graves in Inzersdorf ob der Traisen.

We have built replica of the objects found there one-to-one

and put them on this pig,

because we want to find out how these objects react in fire

and how everything then comes to rest, so to speak, in the prehistoric grave.

It'll take a while until it really burns.

The northern corner starts to burn. The fire was started there.

Documentation team, note it down.

Documentation team might want to move a bit closer.

We've never had smoke like this before.

- It looks crazy this time. - 27-8.

The burial shroud is burning. Now it's going. Okay.

- 273-6. - Blazing?

Not yet. Incipient blaze. Okay.

Bottom sheet, made of wool, is charred.

Look how it blisters.

You can see how the wool blisters. Fantastic.

The burial shroud has been partly blown away.

The food... The flat breads are starting to char.

Pig is burning.

The pig is visible now.

The southern end of the bottom sheet still intact.

Flat breads starting to char.

The bread...

It's quite fierce this time.

The arrow... The arrow is burnt!

524-1.

629-3.

- Okay. - 177-4.

The burial shroud underneath the pig is still fully intact.

Shroud tissue still visible.

- Also charred. - Okay.

Breads are completely charred. Surface of the bowls' contents is charred.

- It's going to collapse. - I know.

The bottom part of the pyre is also burning now.

- It's going to collapse. - That's why we wanted to stabilise it here.

That won't work.

The pyre is tilting to one side.

The pyre is slightly tilting to the east.

It's going to collapse. Fuck.

The pyre has caved in a little bit on the western side, too. Maybe we're lucky.

Yes.

The fabrics underneath the pig are still intact.

- Maybe we should remove these supports. - I'll remove it, let's see what happens.

- These? - Yes.

I'll whack at the eastern side of the pyre to prevent our pig from falling down.

If I can get close enough.

- Fuck, it's so hot! - Yes, it's very hot.

We've got the most important data.

- From which complex is this pot? - It's from Hallstatt.

It's a very well-preserved specimen.

Usually, the finds from Hallstatt are in a very bad condition,

so we're lucky that this one is so well-preserved.

Unfortunately most of its bottom is missing. If it it were ...

completely missing, we wouldn't be allowed to add anything.

But in this case, we add to the bottom and this area

to stabilise it, so it can be displayed standing on its bottom

- and not like now, upside down. Look. - Yes.

Now I need your help. I put ...

this support mould inside the pot

and then I need you to hold it for me carefully.

Don't press too hard, it's quite frail.

- Here. We won't plaster it on the upper part. - Okay.

I know, it's a bit tiring,

but the plaster will harden soon, and you can let it go.

Okay. I think you can let go very carefully now.

Exactly. We'll leave it for a while.

Now you can see the fingerprints, so we have to wait a bit.

But when no fingerprints are left, then it won't change anymore. It's hardened then.

What we see here is rock salt.

You can find it in the middle part of the deposit.

This is over 80% sodium chloride.

For more than 7,000 years it has been the reason

why people settled here in Hallstatt. And it still is.

The oldest still active industrial and cultural landscape worldwide.

We explore the growth and development of this cultural and industrial landscape.

We're here right in the middle of a factory's waste dump, it's six meters high here.

3,000 years ago, miners dumped their rubbish here

and the preservative quality of salt has kept everything intact.

Here, we've found tools, millions of burnt fatwood torches,

and many objects that give us a deep insight into the processes back then.

This is a transportation binding made of tree bast.

They probably used it to bind a whole bundle of tools together to transport them.

Down here, the miners tore the binding and threw it away.

This is the oldest one-way packaging we know of in Europe.

Here you can find everything they needed, and everything is perfectly preserved.

This pile of waste will keep us busy for the next couple of decades.

It holds a lot of information about prehistoric societies,

prehistoric living and work environments.

If we move on here... This area is from ...

probably 560 BC.

And right here, we found the oldest wooden staircase in Europe.

As there are so many tunnels and excavations at our disposal,

we're able to reconstruct work processes in Bronze Age mining quite accurately.

It's not only this deep, detailed insight,

but it also gives us the chance to look at it all on a system level.

The site itself and the many sources of environmental archaeology

like the sediment archives, the lake and the swamps help us

to reconstruct a socio-ecological system,

that is the co-evolution of humans and the environment over thousands of years.

We can do this by tapping various archives,

above all the lakes, Lake Hallstatt itself.

This spring we drilled there with a new drilling device

that allowed us to go much deeper into the sediments than ever before.

This is an incredible opportunity

and gives us a glimpse of the past 12,000 years.

Now we can go back in time as far as the end of the Ice Age and examine

how the environment has changed, and also the impact of humanity.

There was pristine nature and then came humankind and started changing this system.

But the system also adapted to the humans.

And to this end, the sediments are one of our main sources of data,

because you can extract an enormous amount of information from them

like pollen or climate data.

We get an incredible range of information.

That's why we installed this huge drilling platform on Lake Hallstatt

and drilled there for four weeks.

In Hallstatt we can explore how people dealt with

ecological calamities, natural disasters and political changes thousands of years ago

and also how they reacted to these events.

We see how humans and environment functioned over the course of thousands of years.

And this gives us background or basic information on what

we do today and also how we might be operating in the future.

You can trace back a lot of things with microfossils.

We can find out not only how old the sediments and rocks are,

but we can also reconstruct what the environment looked like back then.

This again allows us to draw conclusions about extinction events

and various major events that influenced and changed the world.

This is the intriguing part about palaeontology and geology:

you can combine both disciplines and extract a plenitude of information

from these tiny fossils.

As soon as the water has drained off,

you can ...

take it and put it into small dishes

and leave it to dry in the compartment dryer.

Then we can find the fossils.

I've got a drill core here.

When we break it apart, we can find for example a large fossil.

This is a shell emerging from the core.

And once we have crushed and processed it,

we come to the microfossils that I analyse.

This drill core was taken from a depth of approximately 4,300 meters

and is around 18 million years old.

We know this because of the microfossils' analysis.

So we can tell exactly how old the drill core is,

what the environment looked like back then

and also reconstruct the climate history.

Different species and so different kinds of fossils

existed under different oxygen conditions,

and this is crucial because it helps us to find out if there were

any changes in oxygen concentration before and after major extinction events.

Right now, oxygen in the oceans is a major issue.

There are huge areas where the oxygen level is very low or non-existent.

These are the so-called dead zones in the oceans.

If we can measure exactly how they spread and expand,

we can tell if this was also the case in earlier times.

We can understand the past and are able to make predictions about the future, too.

If oxygen levels dropped before major events back then like they are dropping now,

we can tell what's awaiting us and how things will develop in the future

in terms of extinction of species, and if it will be as devastating as in earlier times

or whether we still have the chance

to stop the process.

I am deeply convinced that a society can only be culturally superior

if it has a superior culture of collecting.

We gather condensates of knowledge,

so to speak, the focal points of our knowledge,

in the form of artefacts, small objects, excavations, insects etc.

A collection of the whole range of whatever interests we have developed as humankind.

But we don't collect because we're greedy.

Collecting is often associated with possession.

Someone collects because they are greedy and want to amass things.

No, no. The first stage of collecting in the sense of hoarding

serves us as much as our consciousness collecting

all those condensates and focal points,

which we will need later on, in the second stage.

And that's the job of museums. They put the objects in order.

We don't just get all the things

and then shove them in boxes somewhere without attending to them.

We arrange them instead to get an overview.

We try to figure out how these things relate to each other.

What common features do they have?

How can we hierarchize them? Into which small box ...

and casket can we put these set pieces of our future knowledge?

And the interesting thing is that museums

often have much larger and more comprehensive collections

than they can handle.

Unlike in other areas of life, in regard to collections very often the rule is

that quantity fosters quality.

The philosophical principle of systematics, classification and taxonomy

is basically the question of what it means to classify things.

How real are systems of classification and taxonomy?

And to what an extent are they constructs that we build to guide us?

And there are also metaphysical questions:

Do the species really exist or are they only a product of our minds?

These questions have been explored since scholastics in the Middle Ages

argued about the problem of universals.

These are philosophical questions,

but they also affect the field of biology.

For example, when we ask ourselves how to systemize nature.

What should the individual groups, the taxa, as we call them, what should they represent?

There are quite different approaches to these issues.

A classic approach, at least since Darwin,

is that the units we define in a system

should be based on descent communities.

That means that our system should be the best possible

reproduction of the historical development,

that is the evolution itself.

This is just one of many options.

In parallel to this, we also use other types of classification, other taxonomies,

that are not based on the theory of evolution, but are purely practical,

for example large mammals vs. small mammals.

Two large mammals, even if they are not related, might have similar problems

and similar needs in their lives. They both need a very sturdy skeleton,

or they possibly have a rather long generation time.

They reproduce very slowly.

Whales, rhinoceroses, elephants and also eagles have this feature in common.

They are not really related, but they do have things in common simply based on their size.

We therefore use different classifications

and taxonomies depending on the question at hand.

But when we say, we explore the biological systematics, our system of reference

is as a rule a system based on evolution theory.

If you stroke this, you clearly feel the flattening.

In case of this child from Leobendorf it's particularly distinct.

Can you imagine how this happened?

They applied bindings around an infant's head very early after birth.

The skull mainly grows during the first three years.

And because the skull's growth has been restricted, it becomes elongated.

Therefore, especially in case of children, large bumps appear on the parietal bone.

The dented forehead and particularly the flattening of the back of the head

are typical indications for an artificial cranial deformation.

The examples we have found in Austria date back to the 5th century, the Migration Period.

In the Migration Period,

this phenomenon is interpreted in ecological terms.

They say it might have represented social status.

- It's possible. - We can't proof it.

Obviously there is some evidence that it can be interpreted this way.

I can't tell social status from a skeleton. I can only tell the deformation.

Maybe the archaeological goods...

But very often, these objects don't give any indications.

- That's the problem. - They're often single finds.

- Exactly. - Without a context it's difficult.

It's useless.

This cranial deformation has no effect on the brain.

It just has to grow in a different direction.

- It didn't kill people. - Even though the binding was so tight.

A modern example for skull deformation is the brace.

We use a brace to change the shape of the jawbone,

so it fits into the dental arch in a corrected way.

It's a modern thing.

And an example for how we modify the skull.

We use these modifications

in various anthropological methods,

for example to determine the age of death

or for studies on osteoporosis.

We can explore all kinds of things through these bone relics.

In the 19th up until the first half of the 20th century,

anthropologists did a lot of studies on living people.

At that time, the focus was racial science.

During the Nazi era, anthropologists, also here

at the Naturhistorische Museum, heavily focused on studying Jews.

It is still quite an emotional and difficult issue for us.

In the archives here at our department we have the documents

regarding the surveys and measurings

that were conducted by the anthropologists here at our museum.

We have for example material from two anthropologists

who worked at the Vienna Institute for Anthropology

and the Institute for German Work in the East in Krakow.

These two women measured over 500 Jewish men, women and children

from a total of 105 families,

just a few weeks before they were killed in the Ghetto of Tarnow in 1942.

And the photographs, horrifying photographs for us today

that we don't like to show,

are still here in our department

together with the written documents.

Various surveys were also carried out here at the Naturhistorisches Museum

under the former director of the anthropological department, Dr Josef Wastl.

One of the surveys was conducted right at the beginning of the war.

Josef Wastl and a team from the Naturhistorisches Museum

went to the Prater stadium

and did an anthropological examination

of 440 Polish Jewish men and also adolescents,

who had been declared stateless.

We have the measuring sheets from that survey in the Prater stadium here,

as well as the minute book, photographs

and also plaster masks of 17 men.

Together with a historian, I did some research on this survey

and we were able to find survivors whom we interviewed.

Among them Gerschon Evan,

who was 16 at that time and in the stadium with his father.

We talked to him about the survey.

It's particularly shocking that one week after the survey...

They were detained in September 1939.

In the third week of their detention, the "Anthropological Commission" measured them.

After that, all the detained men, over 1,000 men, were taken

to the Westbahnhof in Vienna and from there deported to the concentration camp Buchenwald.

Some of these men were former residents of the Jewish old age home at Seegasse.

A lot of elderly, but also young men.

They had to walk all the way from the train station to the concentration camp

and were then placed in a small tent camp.

Most of them died there within a few weeks.

This is an example for how important these documents are,

not only in anthropological terms,

but even more so for the history of persecution

and murder of Jews in Europe.

This is Dr Wastl's bag with his measuring instruments.

He used these instruments to carry out the measuring.

This is one of the most complex indexes we have here.

For example, it says here in this old inventory list:

"Modern Turkish skull,

a gift from Augustin Weisbach".

These are issues that are very relevant for us now

in our project "Kolonialer Kontext II".

We had a query from New Zealand in 2017

and so we started this provenance research,

in order to find out where these skulls from New Zealand really came from

that are now in our museum.

Among other things, we came across diaries

of an Austrian taxidermist

and amateur ornithologist.

We found out that this man,

Andreas Reischek, while travelling in New Zealand

had been completely aware of the fact,

that he had trespassed territories that were off limits.

He knew, he shouldn't be there and, more importantly,

he shouldn't take anything with him or dig up graves.

But he did and he was fully aware

that if he had been caught, they would have given him the death penalty.

And yet, he did all that and wrote everything down in detail, but not very neatly.

So this is the context of injustice and based on this

we decided: Okay, this is a context of injustice.

These skulls must be repatriated!

Because they are more important

for the Māori and Moriori people in New Zealand

than for scientific research.

Together with the New Zealand delegation,

I returned these human remains to New Zealand

and had the privilege to witness

how important these skulls, these human remains are for the Māori people.

It was an incredible experience.

They have a completely different approach to life

and take a lot responsibility for their past and also for the future.

We as a museum of natural history

will continue and intensify our cooperation with the museum in Wellington,

particularly regarding the Māori culture

and the exchange of scientific staff.

For us, the repatriation doesn't mean that

there was a context of injustice,

we returned the human remains and that's it for us.

On the contrary.

By promoting cooperation between peoples and scientists

and also ethnic groups,

we want to foster a better understanding

among various countries and also various research areas.

We'll have to remove a little bit more.

- They want to see her bellybutton? - Exactly.

She turned full circle. We made this virtual rotational axis

in order to change the rotation point.

Now it looks good, but we'll zoom out a bit so we don't have any artefacts on the sides.

Fantastic. No. Really great.

- Venus of Willendorf won't probably... - No, I'm just looking.

Amazing.

Great.

I'm happy, too, that it turned out so well.

This is comparable to...

The state of the art used to be the thin section.

It's one-to-one. You could measure to a µ, because you cut really thin sections.

And this is like a thin section in terms of quality.

You can use this like a blueprint.

This provides insights into details you wouldn't be able to see on the surface.

Like these seashells in there, which tell us

precisely how old the rock is, as these shells existed only in certain time periods.

We wouldn't have been able to see this on the surface.

Up until now, nobody knew that there are fossils inside the Venus figurine.

We also didn't know about these iron concretions you see there,

just a few millimetres in size. How should we have known?

You can't see inside it, they would've said. But today, we know that you actually can.

That last time we had her here,

we examined her with UV-rays,

and we could see these streaks, too. Just amazing.

The quality of the scans is incredible. Fantastic.

It's the very first time that we can see through Venus in this perfect resolution.

While you see a historic-cultural object, I see a geological object.

But we're also interested in the geological object

because of possible points of contact or other kinds of ...

- cultural circulation. - We could also make an intersection.

Sure...

I mean, we've already got it digitally.

We could just make a print.

- I just hope, nothing breaks. - Breaking would be bad.

Oh yes.

- Oh yes? - It'd be bad. Very bad.

Nothing's going to break.

Bones have been broken in the course of much more delicate operations.

- Like you wonder if anybody even touched it. - But they're moving it on wheels.

But now that ladder must go.

Merci.

Oh, there's still someone on top.

Maybe the hip. Or there'd be a real curvature there.

It looks like you've done this before.

No rush, I can't start yet anyway.

- Ready. - Ready? Yes. Good.

You can see exactly the sections I have coloured:

the entire cervical vertebra, then the next section,

another one and then after the hip.

You can see exactly each day's work as I mixed the colour differently.

Yes, but...

Good.