Racing to Save World's Oldest Mummies

摘要

At least 2,000 years before the ancient Egyptians began mummifying their pharaohs, a hunter-gatherer people called the Chinchorro living along the coast of modern-day Chile and Peru developed elaborate methods to mummify not just elites, but the ordinary as well-men, women, children, even fetuses. Radiocarbon dating as far back as 5050 B.C. makes them the world's oldest mummies. However, after staying remarkably well-preserved for millennia, in the past decade many of the Chinchorro mummies have begun to degrade rapidly. To discover the cause and a way to stop the deterioration, Chilean preservationists turned to a Harvard University scientist with a record of solving mysteries around threatened cultural artifacts.