Indians have embalmed the body 5,000 years ago

The South American Indians of the Chichorro culture living in the desert Atakama has mastered the technique of turning the dead into a mummy thanks to climate change from 5 to 7 thousand years ago. That is the conclusion of archaeologists in a work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

>>>Mysterious mummies of the desert of Chile

Chichorro culture appeared about 10 thousand years ago in the territory of Peru and Chile today. Indians live in small villages, eat catches from the sea and live very simply. Chichorro is one of the first tribes of South American Indians to master the technique of embalming.

Their mummification technique is not very complicated, only a few stages. First of all, people pecked away the deceased person's abdomen to remove organs, brain, skin and then apply with clay and paste it on the skin patches that had been removed. It is unclear here that they only mummified for their purpose because their custom does not conduct burial rituals and there is no conception of life after death.

The group of archaeologists led by Pablo Marquet of Santiago Catholic University in Santiago monitored climate change in the desert, after studying glacial sediments in Bolivia. If you know the history of the glacier lake, you can understand the appearance of the ancient Atacama.

According to Pablo Marquet and his colleagues, the Sakhama glacial lake conceals within it the traces of two periods of relatively mild and favorable climate throughout the Atacama region. The first phase begins before the emergence of humans in the New World about 14,000 years ago and lasts about 3 millennia. The later period started 7 thousand years ago and was shorter, only for 2000 years.

Scientists compare climatic documents with archaeological documents, the number and scale of villages in Chinchorro at different times and then use those facts to model population fluctuations. the number of Indians.

The results allow them to conclude: the population of the Atacama desert thrives in the second phase, when the climate becomes pleasant and then suddenly drops to about 4.9 thousand years ago. The 'population explosion' involves two factors: abundant water and food. As a result, Chinchorro moved to a settled lifestyle and began to culturally evolve.

One of the products of this evolution is the art of embalming. Researchers believe that the Atacama desert itself suggests to the Indians this culture. The bodies of the animals that live in the desert due to the very dry climate and intense sunshine are almost undamaged. The embalming technique is also based on the dryness of the air and solar heat.

However, why did they conduct the burial of the dead in such a complicated way? Marquet and his colleagues believe that the embalming technique appeared because in the life of a Chinchirro Aboriginal people there were too many deaths. On average, each person in a tribe of several hundred people participated in the funeral of a few dozen people.