According to a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, the elaborate cult of the dead evidenced by the first mummies in the world may have been a result of unstable climate.
Wet Atacama Desert. Photo by Alberto
The climate of the Atacama desert of Chile, where all this happened between 7,000 and 2,500 years ago, was wildly variable, ranging from so arid natural mummification occurred in bodies buried up to a foot and a half below the ground, to highly erosive periods when mummies were washed out of their graves. Say researchers, that situation, combined with a sophisticated hunting and fishing technology, stimulated the long-lived cultural phenomenon of the Chinchorro mummies.
- Chinchorro culture, including a detailed discussion of the study
- Chinchorro mummies
Marquet PA, Santoro CM, Latorre C, Standen VG, Abades SR, Rivadeneira MM, Arriaza B, and Hochberg ME. 2012. Emergence of social complexity among coastal hunter-gatherers in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
Comments
Hi. I’m the author of the picture in your article. The image was taken in 1998, not in 2010. I put the photograph in a scanner in 2010.
Thanks for the info–good to know. Also, thanks for the photograph, very useful no matter when it was taken.