In mid-March, Live Science published an article about the results of image analysis that had never been done before, showing that the most ancient, oldest human mummies did not come from Egypt or even Egypt. Chile, but Europe.
About 60 years ago, an archaeologist took photos of some skeletons buried in 8,000-year-old tombs in southern Portugal. More than a dozen ancient bodies were found in Portugal’s southern Sado Valley during excavations in the 1960s, researchers said.
And at least one of those bodies was embalmed, possibly for easier transport before burial. In addition, there are signs that other bodies – buried at the same location – may also have been mummified. It is evidence that the practice of mummification was common in this area 8,000 years ago.
Archaeologists believe that the ancients embalmed the body after tying it with string and drying it with fire for several weeks, in order to transport it to the burial site more easily.
The complex mummification process was used in ancient Egypt more than 4,500 years ago, and evidence of mummification has been found elsewhere in Europe, dating back to around 1,000 BC. But the newly identified mummies in Portugal are the oldest ever found and were created before the previous record holders – those from the coastal region of Chile’s Atacama Desert – about 1,000 years.
The mummies are more than 8,000 years old
Rita Peyroteo-Stjerna, a bioarchaeologist at Uppsala University, said that although mummification was relatively simple in very dry conditions like the Atacama Desert, it is difficult to find evidence for This is in Europe, where conditions are much wetter – meaning the soft tissues of mummies rarely preserve well.
“It’s very difficult to make these observations, but it’s possible with combined methods,” she told Live Science. Peyroteo-Stjerna is the lead author of a study on the discovery published this past March in the European Journal of Archaeology.
Evidence of European mummification was found in several rolls of photographic film that Portuguese archaeologist Manuel Farinha dos Santos left behind when he died in 2001. Farinha dos Santos studied the Human remains were excavated from the Sado Valley in the early 1960s.
In new research conducted from photographs taken by Farinha dos Santos more than 60 years ago, scientists discovered black-and-white photographs of 13 tombs from the Paleolithic, or Stone Age between. Using photographs to reconstruct burials at two sites, scientists observed that the bones of one skeleton were “hypermobile” – that is, the arms and legs were moved beyond their natural limits – this shows that the deceased’s body was tied very tightly after death.
The world’s oldest method of embalming
Photos of one of the skeletons excavated from an archaeological site in Sado Valley show signs it was mummified before being buried about 8,000 years ago.
Furthermore, the bones of the remains remain attached to each other after burial, when in fact most of the very small foot bones are often completely detached as the body decomposes.
Strangely, there is no indication that the soil of the tomb was ever moved as the soft tissue of the human body decomposed. This also means that no decomposition occurs.
“Taken together, these signs indicate that the body was mummified after death,” said Peyroteo-Stjerna, who said that the body may have been intentionally dried and then gradually shrunk by wrapping it in wire. tight all around.
Experiments on these remains show that ancient people may have performed certain operations when embalming the dead in the Sado Valley.
Experts say it’s likely that ancient residents tied the dead up, then placed them on a tall structure, such as a raised platform, to allow decomposing fluids to escape and avoid contact with the body. can.
Another possibility is that they used fire to dry the body and used ropes to tie the body, gradually tightening over time.
Archaeologist Peyroteo-Stjerna said that if some remains were brought from elsewhere to the Sado valley for burial, embalming to make the corpse much smaller and lighter would make the transportation process easier. easier.
