7,000-Year-Old Chinchorro Mummies Have CT Scans To ‘Bring To Life Someone Who Died Thousands Of Years Ago’

INQUISITR.COM / Science
By Kristine Moore
Published on: 2016-12-27T23:43:40
peru south america

The oldest mummies in the world, Chinchorro mummies from Peru that date back over 7,000 years, have just had a very special check-up in the form of a CT scan. They were some of the first people in civilization that embalmed and mummified their dead, and the Chinchorro mummies are even 2,000 years older than Egyptian mummies.

The Chinchorro people were hunter-gatherers and lived near the Atacama desert along the Pacific coast of South America from 10,000 to 3,400 BC. Now, Archaeology.org reveals that 15 of these Chinchorro mummies have been taken from their home at Chile’s National Museum of Natural History to the Los Condes Clinic so that scientists could see what the humans inside really looked like, as Chief Cardiologist Marcelo Galvez explained.

“We want to see what they physically looked like, to reconstruct them and bring to life someone who died thousands of years ago.”

News Online from Australia describes how the CAT scanner will help to show not only how these mummies looked in life, but will also decode their genes so that we will be able to understand ancient civilizations better. Once their DNA has been analyzed, it will help scientists to locate genetic links with modern-day people in the area.

An interactive display of a CT scan of a Peruvian mummy at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles on September 10, 2015.
An interactive display of a CT scan of a Peruvian mummy at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles on September 10, 2015. [Image by Jae C. Hong/AP Images]

Marcelo Galvez described part of the process that the team of scientists used when putting the 15 mummies, which were mainly unborn babies and children, through the CAT scanner.

“We collected thousands of images with a precision of less than one millimeter. The next phase is to try to dissect these bodies virtually, without touching them, which will help us preserve them for another 500,000 years.”

Scientists are also hopeful that their work will yield more clues about how the Chinchorro people mummified their dead loved ones and friends. This group of people were very well-versed when it came to human anatomy and when one of their people died, they would painstakingly remove their muscles and also their skin.

As the skin and muscles of the dead had been removed, when the Chinchorro people wanted to create the illusion of something that looked more human, they would take clay, plants, and wood and use these to reconstruct what looked like a body around the remaining skeletal structure.

After they did this, they took the skin they had originally taken off and sewed it back. Then they added eyes, hair, and a mouth. Last but not least, a mask was added to their face. In this way, the Chinchorro people mummified their dead.

The mummification process for the Chinchorro people was a very personal and family affair. In fact, it was the families of the deceased who would fashion these mummies. The oldest of these Chinchorro mummies were babies and unborn fetuses, but all of the mummies were created in the same way, regardless of age.

Since 1903, 180 of these mummies have been discovered and they were all found near the beach. Chinchorro mummies were placed simply outside without any elaborate structures like the Egyptian pyramids, which were used to house Egyptian mummies.

Ancient mummies of Peruvian children on display in Los Angeles at the Natural History Museum on September 10, 2015.
Ancient mummies of Peruvian children on display in Los Angeles at the Natural History Museum on September 10, 2015. [Image by Jae C. Hong/AP Images]

Part of the reason that these CAT scans are so important is that at the moment, scientists don’t know much about these people as they left no records behind them. The Chinchorro mummies are really the only record of these people that we have. Veronica Silva, who works at Chile’s National Museum of Natural History, describes the importance of their work.

“We are effectively talking about the oldest artificially mummified bodies in the world. The Chinchorro mummies date to 7,400 years ago. That is to say, this system existed 2,000 years before the first mummifications even began in Egypt.”

Once more information is analyzed from the computerized tomography scans and DNA analysis on this project, we will be on our way to learning more about these Chinchorro mummies, the oldest mummies in the world.

[Featured Image by Martin Mejia/AP Images]