Hey, I'm Flor Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, archaeologists are turning their attention to an art form that's been largely overlooked.

Tattoos.

To modify is human, and it has been since the beginning.

Last. is human, and it has been since the beginning. Last month, researchers used near-infrared photography to get a brand new, detailed look

at human art from thousands of years ago. A beautiful scene of wild animals kind of tussled in a fight. But these

weren't paintings on a cave wall or a rock somewhere. They were tattoos on the arm of an ancient

Siberian woman who lived 2300 years ago. Ancient tattoos may seem like an unconventional

academic focus, which is why I love the story so much.

So what can Ancient Inc. tell us about our ancestors? A lot, according to my next guests.

Here, to stick and poke our way into this topic are Aaron Dieter Wolf, archaeologist for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology

based in Nashville, and his research collaborator, Danny Riede, a practicing tattoo artist based

in Léz-Z-France. Welcome to you both to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Laura. It's

great to be here. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. Okay, Aaron, let's start with you. Let's start

with this new study on this ancient Siberian mummy. First of all, what did her tattoos look like? Can you describe them?

So this woman had a series of tattoos on both of her arms. Both of her forearms were tattooed with scenes of animals that, as you said, are tussling or engaged in fighting or battle.

And then both of her hands also then have series of tattoos on them on the thumbs and across her first knuckles of her fingers.

I mean, I'm looking at it. It's so beautiful. First of all, I feel like anyone listening really should check it out. We're going to put it on our Instagram at SciFry so you can see it. And it looks like three, I don't know, tigers, would you say that? Sort of going after elk? How would you describe it?

Elk, deer, horse deer. You know, there's this, this whole style of

art has been called a Scythian animal style. And one of the fun things about this has been that Danny,

who has been collaborating with me for years on projects related to ancient tattooing,

one of his practices is working in Scythian animal style art. He does a lot of

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