The Oldest Mummies In The World (Archaeology Documentary) | Timeline

[Music] the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest place on earth it stretches from the foothills of the Andes a hundred miles westward to the edge of the Pacific Ocean there are a few signs of life here it hasn't rained in parts for thousands of years but the very dryness of the Atacama has made it the perfect keeper of a unique treasure buried in its sands are the intimate secrets of an ancient world the legacy of a Stone Age people who believed they could conquer death [Music] the town of a reco on the Pacific coast at the edge of the desert was once a tiny fishing village for the locals harvesting the fruits of the ocean is a timeless tradition a way of life which brought the first settlers here and has supported a Ricans ever since just how long people have lived here came to light in 1983 when a sensational excavation uncovered an ancient burial ground at the edge of town the bodies and artifacts that were buried here confirmed that these early people had also lived off the sea 9,000 years ago but the excavation revealed something even more astonishing all 96 bodies buried in layers had been mummified these were the oldest mummies ever found anywhere in the world the earliest was almost 9,000 years old [Music] a remote fishing community in South America had practiced the art of mummification before the birth of civilization and at least 2,000 years before the legendary mummy makers of Egypt who were the people who carefully mummified this young woman and buried her so reverently in the sand hills of the coast 9,000 years ago where did they come from and what was behind their strange obsession with death [Music] it's been known for some time that an ancient people once lived at the atacama coast on the edge of the desert they were coal chinchorros it's Spanish for a small fishnet bag these bags were found buried with their owners and Chinchorro graves the chinchillas lived a basic lifestyle they had no metal or ceramics no wheel or beasts of burden they left no signs of written language and no permanent buildings there were a simple Stone Age people [Music] but the way they treated their dead was anything but simple the chinchillas mummified their debt everyone their respective of rank or social position men women and children and the strange thing is the mummies weren't buried immediately they kept them on display all around them why would they do this it's one of many questions surrounding the chinchorros that's intriguing scientists they believe the answer may lie with the mummies themselves this is a mummified body of a Chinchorro woman who live in arica thousands of years ago she had been prepared for her journey into the afterlife in a very special way of course you find mummies in many places but it's only recently that we have come to realize just how unique distance your mommies are Bernardo Arrieta is a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada and a native Chilean he's worked with colleagues from a local museum studying the chinchorros over the past 20 years since the arica discovery in 1983 their knowledge of the chinchorros has expanded dramatically and it's captured the imagination of researchers in other fields I think we're just beginning to understand who the insurers are and as we have more specialists coming into the pictures I think we can have a rainbow of researchers trying to shed light on why what's going on with with the teacher of people the fact is a people who began the art of mummifying have until now been largely overlooked one of the reason why does ensure they haven't received too much attention is because they have very little in the way of cultural materials they don't have large buildings about their technology is rather practical technology but their emphasis was into the day local archaeologist Vivian Standen is leading the present dig it will be the last for a long time the reason lies back in 1983 and the famous excavation at arica the 96 bodies that were recovered established the chinchorros as the earliest and most prolific mummy makers that the world had ever seen but it left scientists with more bodies than they could comfortably process it also raised the problem of preservation vivianne standin was there on the one hand it was a positive exciting and thrilling discovery but on the other hand it was very frustrating there was the problem of preserving these mummies removing them from the place where they had been for thousands of years without having the right conditions to preserve them properly it was worrying it produced conflicting emotions in me but it had to be done it was a rescue operation that had to be done and quickly the site belonged to a private water company who stopped work just long enough for the mummies to be removed they were brought to the Museum of san miguel de azapa ten miles outside of Arica it's part of the local university and a prestigious center of archaeology to accommodate the sheer volume of skulls bones and bodies from the dig it meant staff had to relocate various pots and artifacts of lesser importance even Inca mummies at one time the museum's major attraction took a backseat in favor of the newly discovered Chinchorro treasures in a temperature-controlled air-conditioned annex the best preserved and most valuable mummies were stored awaiting examination by the experts [Music] this young woman wrapped in a red cape with clay face mask and week is a typical chinchilla mummy museum staff call her the Black Madonna the [Music] collection has hundreds of fragments of mummies many of them skulls that have lost their clay face masks but they contain vital forensic evidence of the chinchillas health living conditions and even cause of death the first Chinchorro mummies ever found back in 1915 was this child then no one had any idea that it was thousands of years old now at least she's surrounded by chinchillas perhaps even members of her own family this season Bernardo Arrieta has brought together a team of experts to help unravel the mystery of the mummies Calogero Santoro a local archeologist is a Chinchorro expert who's been on most days Roley not only they learn how to do the mummification but also they the basic things of their society were also transmitted at the same time when those moment where creating and the wood adapted is an incredible powerful image to sort of hold societies yeah that I mean they are the ultimate feel like is gonna like dr. Joanne Fletcher from England is a leading authority on Egyptian mummies she's keen to compare Chinchorro methods with those who mummified the pharaohs it's difficult to get the Chinchorro story is fascinating it's a culture that was practicing very elaborate forms of mummification at least two if not three thousand years before the beginning of the same practice in Egypt although on the surface their stories did seem comparable there were effectively coming from very different directions it was a very very different story altogether but do the mummies of Egypt and Chile have anything in common whenever we think of mummies we inevitably think of ancient Egypt and the ancient Egyptians were indeed mass as of the art of mummification the body would be taken to the embalmers who would wash it and then it would be disemboweled the internal organs removed I'll accept the heart the brain would also be removed and discarded then the body would be dried out for 40 days and it would be washed again anointed with oils and resins to seal the surface of the skin then it will be wrapped in bandages in fine strips of linen after it was placed in the coffin it will be returned to the family on the coastal cliffs were the new dig is taking place there are Chinchorro mummies everywhere just beneath the surface of the sands John Fletcher sees her first one exactly where it was left thousands of years ago presumably this is a whole cemetery sigh across here because the slope part is happiness both for thousands of years now there are popping happens and what you see here is a naturally mummified body absolutely amazing you can see the texture of the epidermis it's fantastic the la roux nikki purvy owner we re not on there it's very common to see this kind of inflammation of better stages we can show you some in the lab because we have other specimens with inflammation of the lower legs it's brilliant to see actually the truly cool of the ground in fear and this is is this read nothing that would be associated with the body yeah most likely because the bodies were wrapped with read mats that's exactly the kind of thing you'd find I mean this is almost exactly like an Egyptian burial in the desert with the reed matsing and the soft tissue preserved to this level this is fantastic Egyptian mummy making was inspired by the Sahara Desert it's likely that the chinchorros first mummies were created accidentally in the Atacama Desert a mummy is a dead body in which the normal processes of decay have been suspended around 9,000 years ago the Chinchorro simply wrapped their dead in red shrouds then carefully buried them in the Atacama knowing that the dry desert sands would do the rest slowly over a thousand year period they adapted this natural phenomenon into an elaborate post-mortem ritual that was completely unnatural their mummification technique was absolutely unique with Flintstone knives they cut off all the flesh they disemboweled the body removing all soft tissue and the brain [Music] then they reinforced the skeleton by tying sticks to the bones the empty body cavities were packed out with grass ashes and animal hair and the skin was reattached arms and legs were also strengthened with stakes then individually wrapped with a reed matting the entire body was covered with a plaster of white ash paste then stained with black manganese a clay mask with an elaborate wig of human hair attached covered the face and head the finished mummy was designed to be moved around a robust effigy that was very different from the pictorial splendor of the Egyptians ironically the images which yourself familiar to us from ancient Egypt aren't mummies at all simply looking at the outer casing we must remember it isn't the individual it isn't the body it's simply the outer covering for the body which originally would have laid inside the body in the case of the chinchero can't be divorced from the wrappings it's a complete package the mummified body the wrappings and the masks they are incredibly plain and simple and yet they're very very modern in their appearance they've kind of distilled the facial features down to their very basics but they have nevertheless the ability to move as in an incredible way something which the ancient Egyptians never quite managed most remarkable of all unlike anyone else the chinchorros carried out their sophisticated mummification processes on their children as well as adults it seems they wanted to keep all of their dead with them it's as if in some sense they felt they were still alive at the hillside dig the team are uncovering strong evidence that this was the site of a Chinchorro settlement lasting thousands of years the locations ideally placed on a steep sandy slope layer after layer of shell middens and other telltale refuse is emerging each layer separated by centuries as a snapshot to the archaeologists picture album of the past a view of the chinchorros way of life is emerging they were a Stone Age hunter-gatherer people who had abandoned their nomadic ways for a more settled existence at the coast and here they stayed for thousands of years they had all they needed for a relatively comfortable existence there were sea lines to hunt and fish to catch they had cactus needles to make the fishhooks reads from the river valley and animal fur to make clothing and mats intricate fishing nets and delicate little body garments and shrouds in which to wrap their dead [Music] the picture that was beginning to form was that of a primitive yet highly creative people whose imagination and spiritual energy was not poured into pots furniture of buildings but into the mysterious art of mummifying their dead and as we start to include more technological analysis laboratory technique for the dyad four-rotor ideology of scanning then we're really building incredible pictures of the chinchorros we are reconstructing their daily life but it wasn't a healthy picture Chinchorro skulls reveal that this dependence on the sea took its toll many males suffer from auditory access ptosis a disease of the ear canal that leads to deafness so it's a condition you mainly see in elder males kind of like an inflammation of the air we tend to think is associated with shellfish in gathering food and diving in cold water and we can see some of the fracture okay here you can see a tremendous blow today to the head this was no Garden of Eden life was tough at the best of times and violence was common yeah we tend to see this kind of structural on the head mostly a man this one here we can see some of the fracture the individual could have caused blindness in their eyes but still also moss on the left side so I think the moral of the story is that we see some kind of interpersonal violence in this population and they are not as peaceful as we used to think it was a turbulent life at the coast why would the chinchorros begin to make mummies there and how do they compare with those of Egypt ancient Egypt has always looked to as the cradle of mummification of civilization in so many farms and yet it must be realized that the Chinchorro were several millennia ahead of the Egyptians in this and there are two mummification was no less sophisticated and so I am incredibly impressed by the Chinchorro legacy I think their ability to mummify is second to none and I include the Egyptians in this [Music] so who made the Chinchorro mummies who prepared the bodies there are no written records there is no direct evidence to say it seems likely that women would have been the ones responsible it was the men who were going out and diving for fish and sea produce the food that the Chinchorro relied on and it would presumably be the women who would then process these foodstuff and it's a very similar procedure to then defleshing a human being first the skin had to be removed then the flesh and finally the skin was reattached only women had the experience to carry out this delicate task I think women by and large are more comfortable around blood it's it's more of a familiar thing with the menstrual cycle for instance on a regular basis they are quite used to dealing with with blood they also perhaps have more motivation towards the preservation of the dead we know that there was a very high incidence of infant mortality and the incredibly strong bond between mother and child would have perhaps initiated the beginnings of mummification with the mother's desire to keep her child with her at all cost the way in which the Chinchorro processed the dead shows an incredible degree of sophistication they were very very familiar with the anatomy of humans to remove the internal organs to prevent decomposition you can see here quite clearly the major evisceration scar which has been sewn up and that is exactly what we see in ancient Egyptian remains this is an amazing display of attention to detail the way that the nails were dressed the way that the thing was then clothed in this beautiful grass skirt and this these small shoes it's really quite moving it's a child bird with beautifully made clothes and so forth this child is little more than a baby mummifying children it seems was very dear to the chinchorros this is the mummy of a very young boy and yet it's been supplied with the most elaborate wig you can see on both sides the long hair coming down in here these beautiful waves the vast majority of the artificial mummies do appear to be children and this is certainly not the case in many other ancient cultures where children most of the time aren't even given a decent burial mummification elsewhere was usually reserved for the privileged the powerful and the rich it takes time energy and dedication yet the chinchillas mummified every one in the most elaborate way thousands of years before the Egyptians why did they do it and where the Dees extraordinary people come from the chinchorros were the first people to arrive here and settle permanently 9,000 years ago but their origins are a mystery there are three popular theories they could have come by boat from somewhere in the Pacific but there's no evidence to support this they could have traveled along the coast from north or south there is some evidence to support this but Bernardo Arrieta has a different idea altogether I think the Chinchorro came from the highlands and from the highlands they cut through the desert which is amazingly dry and they found this beautiful narrow river valleys that go all the way to the coast and there they found a little paradise because it's teeming with wildlife shellfish mollusk different kinds sea lions brief and plan to eat and they settle there and they settled about 9,000 years ago we have solid evidence for that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] arietis theory that the chinchillas were originally a mountain people who migrated to the coast is supported by evidence that was found a hundred miles away high in the Andes Calogero Santora is an expert on the chinchorros and the nomadic people of the high Andes he recently found a ten thousand year old shark's tooth in this cave ten thousand feet above sea level it's proof that the people who once lived here must have been to the coast this is one of the best place for shelter for human beings about ten thousand years ago people come over here they stop for several days probably to take advantages of of the nice resources that they have here at water they have birds they were hunting the animal that are living here today the Kuna which is this mammal that belongs to the Camila family these small rabbits that is called the Scaccia which is pretty easy to to hunt it's the ideal territory for hunter-gatherers and ten thousand years ago there were certainly groups of them living here but something cataclysmic happened to change all that [Music] after a thousand years ago something happened in this environment and we know now from geologists that there was a huge drought along the Andes this is coinciding with an explosion of many settlement in the coast it's very probable that the chinchillas were a nomadic people who came to the coast when serious droughts drove them down from the Andes but first they had to negotiate the harsh Atacama Desert people always want to explore new territories to discover to find what is on the other side of the mountain but I finish ensure were the first to use these corridors because we can call it starting about 9,000 years ago at the Museum of san miguel de azapa the job of collating and cataloging Chinchorro relics and artifacts has been ongoing since the discovery of 1983 their computers now contain a complete database of all available Chinchorro materials and research it's an important piece of work and is being added to all the time to Americans who specialized in the non-destructive examination of fragile objects are studying the mummies in their own way their findings will feed into the museum's database there was a lot of cuts on the right side Ron Beckett and Jerry con la Gore anatomical detectives to carry out further analysis they've come up with the idea of taking some of the mummies to be x-rayed at a local hospital this is an opportunity to x-ray probably the most unusual mummies in the world over about the past eight years I've x-rayed a number of mummies primarily in Peru and at museums in the United States but these are by far the most interesting all the individuals that we're able to work on will will be able to paint a little bit of their story of their life once we get enough data from our preliminary work here and look at many many many more moments of the general population be able to add data to give bernardo and his colleagues much more data points to work with in recreating what their culture was about [Music] a local hearse lends dignity to a surprisingly moving occasion it's also the safest means of transport for fragile cargo [Music] it's the mummies first outings is the discovery in 1983 and once more they're making local history [Music] at this stage no one has any idea just how important the hospital tests that are about to begin will turn out to be one of the interesting things about the x-ray mom is like this because you never know what you're gonna find exactly the kinds of things that the x-ray will be able to determine his relative age the presence or absence of pathology any kind of abnormalities with the bone and if we were very lucky we might even be able to do that something that contributed to the cause of death one of the oldest mummies is the first to be examined it's eight and a half thousand years old and the x-rays revealed that beneath the wrappings is a young woman who died violently the brow Ridge is flattened indicates more of a female character than a male character so it's probably a female maybe 18 this 18 year old Chinchorro girl has serious skull fractures they may have caused her death even more intriguing there are signs of cut marks on the bones of her legs these are a mystery the cortex seems to be broken so it really looks like it's been cut across here the girl was naturally mummified by desert winds so there should have been no interference with the corpse attempt to affecting the wheel or well this one over here would be more cultural practices postmodern but Martin maybe you try to modify the body more like the cuts would definitely inflicted after death but why the mummified 18 year old girl is moved to the CT scan a CT scan takes high-definition x-ray pictures in cross-sections and at intervals as the subject moves past its scanning eye there's little doubt that the girl died from the violent blows to her skull but the cuts on her legs inflicted after death remain a mystery well we're seeing some slices through the skull and there appears to be some residual brain on the right side which means that when the body was being prepared it was probably on its right side so that the brain collapsed to the right you can see the wrappings quite clearly on the face and the poles and the wrappings around the face see it clearly oh yeah the fracture of the mandible very very nice let's see there appears to be a fracture in the back of the skull the occipital bone protruding into the foramen magnum Wow looks like quite a bash we've taken a lot of force we can tell it the scholars fraction whether that brought about the demise of the individual or not it's impossible to tell the people from the museum seem to be quite surprised that there were intentional cut marks on this natural mummy so there must have been some procedure that they went through for some reason they had to cut the bones which we don't know we can make a much better assessment looking with the axial slices through this area than on the conventional x-rays so right away we can see a fracture through the femur there's a fracture right through here we can see wrapping it looks like each leg is individually wrapped ncredible the cuts through the girl's leg bones are clearly visible in cross-section you hardly ever see a longitudinal fracture like this and it's continued almost the entire length of the femur incredible incredible are you seeing that before no I've never seen I have never ever seen that if there can be only one reason for the bones to be split lengthways it's almost as though the marrow cavity has been open and these bonus intentionally it just finds peers as though the bones have been split longitudinally cutting into the bone to open it up to remove or to access the marrow for whatever reason I'm sure it wasn't for DNA analysis this is an observation that we could clearly document from the images the implications of that are probably going to have to be drawn by the anthropologists the CT scan reveals details of this mummy's treatment that has shocking implications you can see on the cat scan where they were cut into and separate separated that's very kind of energy will never receive that so would be then what think about was more than are tenacious we post word of alterations possibly providing access to the bone what the scientists are skirting around his cannibalism it's a discovery they didn't expect and are reluctant to accept but it might explain why the chinchillas so carefully cut all the flesh from their corpses before mummifying them Joe Fletcher's not surprised although cannibalism is an incredibly emotive word we shouldn't let modern sensibilities cloud the way we see these very ancient people in creating a chinchero mommy you certainly skin the body remove certain muscles and soft tissue you use the skin and the bones to then create the mummy as well as the vegetable matter the sticks breeds and so forth but the the material that is not actually used in the mummy itself the the skin and soft tissue it seems to me illogical that they'd simply throw it away and discard it for us today is hard to believe what to think in the idea to it a fragment of human or the other human means but in those days I think that well it wasn't it wasn't something terrible you know it was something that happened because it had to happen you know it was it was part of their of their beliefs Iran and and that was it the thing is it was not even because they were sure of a third you know that's that's a completely different thing you know it should never be underestimated the importance of of the the whole process of birth of childbirth in these ancient cultures and for a woman to give birth to a child to see it die and then want to preserve it and mummify it it's only a short step away from then wanting to sort of take the child back into yourself to ingest the child the essence of the child as an act of love it's nothing I've ever seen in any other culture that's kind of turning accepted wisdom on its head we're looking at a completely different mindset and that's the exciting thing here the idea that the chinchillas may have consumed the flesh of their babies is extraordinary but at the hospital there are other revelations these tiny figures less than a foot long were found buried with children and Chinchorro graves they may be dolls but they look exactly like miniature mummies if they are mummies their size means they can only be fetuses mummifying unborn children is unheard of anywhere evidence of bones inside the figures is the proof that's needed they're human we have just one individual or we have several but it makes if you got to really even imagine an orbit the conventional x-ray shows no sign of movements or not enough to be convinced together there's just not enough bone there to really make a definitive statement so to see t-shirts a lot of this guy does one centimeter [Music] Tencent diminish I know I know me this acquaintance although their minut is decided to put the figurines through the CT scan here we are doing the first scan of this insurer of figurines and we have assumed that their fetal bones inside or this is a fetus that was mummified and are there humans bones or not I hope the scanner is going to tell us that suspense since the in the center interesting [Music] definitely is we're looking at a clay this area there are reeds around here and what we're really trying to figure out is this shape in the center is it a skull there would not be very much bone present that this was a fetus so we're not gonna see it jump out and that's the way wouldn't hold their individual but again what we're looking for a shape there certainly is some substance here and here and again it would probably be fairly easy to convince yourself that those are plates of the skull but you can't say that for sure yet we haven't seen anything really conclusive the fact that the scan is unclear is expected these tiny fragments of thousands of years old and the bone of an unborn baby would be very soft and anyway how likely is it that unborn babies would be preserved it's simply unheard of in any society anywhere in the world well on two slices it really looked like we were seeing a humerus but now this is way too thick the cortex is the outer portion of the bone this would be way too thick for a cortex of a fetus on one slice we saw something that might be the humerus but on the next slice it turned out it probably wasn't the other so I'd have to summarize by saying that we didn't find any bones on this particular mummy it made me that the soft bones of an unborn baby are too difficult to detect even with the CT scan a tiny Chinchorro head less than two inches by one inch is the last figurine to be tested the hospital's leading radiologist has joined the team his job is to interpret even the most obscure scan the manganese stops a lot of the x-rays so it's very wait this is not stopping as much x-ray and it's a little less white and you would expect the bone on a fetus be less dense again the patterns aren't really consistent with bone that I can recognize the doctor sees something interesting in a new scan of the tiny head but it's not definitive this next this could possibly be a region around ethmoid air cells eyes on either side but now the shapes are are somewhat confusing because one where [ __ ] meant he can equip different direction they drifted they certainly could be he whistles and then there is something the Sheep is right for Freeman Magnum and maxilla see but I am ia thinner we that live [Music] what's he play and the doctor confirms that the evidence is there it's a bone surrounding the eye very small but definitely part of the eye socket this tiny head the size of a golf ball is the mummified head of an unborn child see [Music] yes it's human is human deformation the whole structure is there eating so the chinchillas mummified even their unborn that's very unique and intriguing very intriguing why do you need to go to all the sectors then keep to mummify and it's stillborn what do we make of a violent Stone Age Society who may have practiced cannibalism and yet respected every man woman and child and even unborn infant sufficiently to mummify them and keep them on display all around did they have a notion of the sanctity of life that comes close to the idea of a soul I think initially the Chinchorro have been passed over is a so-called primitive society and this is to define a society in terms of the fact that they had no pottery there it was pre ceramic they had no writing they didn't have this they didn't have that therefore they must have been primitive if you look at the Chimchar society as a whole the things that were important to them the things that have remained that they wanted to remain were their own bodies the mummies there were items to be looked at and appreciated for what they represented they're trying to preserve the very moment when life ends and death begins but death is a transition hence the fact that so many of these mummies their faces have open mouths to either take in food drink and possibly also the desire to communicate in some way it's not particularly far-fetched to imagine the individuals within territorial society actually approaching the mummies and holding them as objects of veneration perhaps with death all around them the chinchillas believed that mummification could cheat it a way of keeping loved ones almost alive the recent research has fueled a new interest in an extraordinary people who mummified their dead for four thousand years then just as mysteriously stopped the museum has built this new Chinchorro room that puts the mummies once more center stage among the living just as their makers originally intended and at the atacama coast there's no doubt the spirit of a people who were once obsessed with death or perhaps life and who produced the world's first mummies is still very much alive [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,574,751

Rating: 4.786541 out of 5

Keywords: BBC documentary, Full Documentary, Documentaries, mummies documentary, history documentary, History, TV Shows - Topic, Channel 4 documentary, documentary history, archaeology documentary, Documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, Full length Documentaries, 2017 documentary, real, stories

Id: 9LZZk376voI

Length: 49min 46sec (2986 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/badbitchincoming]

The fact that they used to mummify fetuses gave me some really new insight into the values of ancient south american culture.