Preserved by one of Earth’s driest climates, a long-buried corpse in Chile’s Atacama Desert retains centuries-old skin, hair, and clothing (picture). Naturally dehydrated corpses like this probably inspired the region’s ancient Chinchorro people to actively mummify their dead, a new study…
Living in fishing villages along the coasts of Chile and Peru, the Chinchorro had begun mummifying skeletons by 5050 B.C., thousands of years before the Egyptians. Archaeologists have long wondered how the practice—and a related cult of death—arose, with some speculating it had been imported from the notably wetter Amazon Basin.
Laid to rest on woven reeds, a bewigged prehistoric boy—or a reasonable facsimile—bears evidence to the Chinchorro’s complex mummification rituals. Rather than preserving flesh, the desert people used a paste of manganese-infused ash to sculpt “bodies” atop defleshed skeletons, whose internal organs had been replaced with earth.
A “black” mummy seems to smile beneath a 5,000-year-old coating of dark ash paste and a human-hair wig.
Emerging around 5,000 B.C., the black style of mummification lasted more than two millennia among the Chinchorro.
A border of whale bones mark the grave of two adult and two infant Chinchorro mummies, possibly part of the same family. The Chinchorro may have mummified their dead as a way of coping with the persistence of their ancestors’ bodies in the arid Atacama.