Massive trauma found on 1000 year old South American mummies

Categories: Historical news

'Massive trauma'found on 1,000-year-old South American mummies

Around 1,000years ago, two men in South America were likely murdered in cold blood — onegetting stabbed in the back and the other experiencing severe neck trauma, accordingto a new analysis of their mummified remains.

Behavingmore like detectives than academics, a research team scanned three mummifiedbodies from Chile and Peru in South America to look for clues on how theindividuals died. One male victim was hit on the head and stabbed in the back,while another male was likely killed after receiving "massivetrauma" to the neck, which included dislocation, the researchersrevealed.

The studyadds to evidence of violence in prehistoric human societies and highlights howmummified remains can hold secrets that are lost when only bones are preserved.Both the stabbing and the cervical rotational trauma of the dislocated neckwould have escaped detection in skeletons, the authors wrote in the study.

"Thetypes of trauma we found would not have been detectable if these human remainshad been mere skeletons," study co-author Andreas Nerlich, a professor in thedepartment of pathology at Munich Clinic Bogenhausen in Germany, said in astatement(opens in new tab).

Human bodiescan be naturally mummified in dry, cold or other extreme environments, as theseenvironments interfere with the process of decay that normally destroys softtissues and organs. In this case, researchers studied mummies that werepreserved in the very dry environments of South America and being held bymuseums in Germany and Switzerland.

Radiocarbondating revealed that the mummies were between 740 and 1,120 years old, meaningthey predated the colonial Spanish period. One male mummy likely came from theArica culture in what is now northern Chile. He was buried alongside fishingtools, so the researchers determined he likely came from a fishing community. Thetwo other mummies, a male and female, likely came from the Arequipa regionin what is now southwestern Peru and were buried wearing materials made out ofcotton and hair from llamas or alpacas, as well as viscachas, which are rodentsin the chinchilla family.

Othermummified remains may also have histories waiting to be revealed through modernscanning and reconstruction techniques. "There are dozens of SouthAmerican mummies which might profit from a similar investigation as donehere," Nerlich said.