The secret behind the mummy of ancient children in Chile

Living in a barren desert north of Chile's Pacific coast more than 7,000 years ago, the Chinchorro tribe began mysteriously embalming children's carcasses - removing organs, washing bones, filling and Stitch skin, wear wigs and mask up for mummies.

Chinchorro mummies are the oldest preserved human corpses, dating back thousands of years before the Egyptian mummy was born, and the task of archaeologists was to find out why this early society was shaped. into such a complicated procedure.

Archaeologist Bernardo Arriaza at the University of Tarapaca in Chile gave a daring hypothesis earlier this year.

" I have read a Chilean newspaper talking about arsenic and lead pollution, including arsenic writing that can cause miscarriage. I jumped up and uttered: That's right ," Arriaza said.

Arriaza said high levels of arsenic in the water in the area, which existed today, have led to high rates of premature birth, premature death and miscarriage in Chinchorro people. " We knew that Camarones, the area where mummies were found, had lots of arsenic and the first mummies were all children ."

He argued that the Chinchorro originally preserved the bodies of children to express the mourning of individuals and communities, then proceeded to embalm the adults and the procedure became more and more sophisticated.

By the 1960s, archaeologists had unearthed more than 100 light, delicate and deliberately preserved corpses. They are stuffed with plants and decorated with clay. They also found hooks, baskets and shells used as mattresses, still with red and black paint stains to decorate the mummy.

The Chinchorro are hunters and gatherers, living at the river mouth, catching fish with nets, spears, hooks and making mobile huts and sea lion bones.

Their primitive life had no pets, ceramics, agriculture and metallurgy, completely in opposition to the sophisticated mummification they had created for thousands of years, before the Inca civilization dominated and promoted. embalming procedures.

" This complex funeral ritual is often associated with more advanced societies, but these are just hunter-gatherers with a simple political society, " Vivien Standen archaeologist at Tarapaca University. identify.

This procedure took more than 3,000 years and went through different stages when Chinchorro society disappeared in 2000 BC.

The oldest mummies are like a statue covered with black clay. Thousands of years later, the treatment of skin and bones became more technical and the Chinchorro began decorating mummies with red paint on mouth-opening masks.

The researchers are still analyzing the quartz spear in a bone some mummies and traces of hits on the left side of the face. The hypothesis is that there was violence in the funeral ritual.

MT