Scientists have decoded the DNA of the oldest mummies on Earth – RIA Novosti

11:2526.12.2016

(updated: 12:14 26.12.2016)

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MOSCOW, 26 Dec – RIA Novosti. Geneticists from the National Museum of natural history, Chile has decoded the DNA and scanned some of the oldest mummies on Earth, made by the Indians chinchorro, according to Phys.org.

“In the first of the mummies that we studied had no bones. She, apparently, was a fake, a doll representing the person in whom for some unknown reasons, failed to turn into a mummy. By studying these bodies, we want to understand who he was and lives of the chinchorro Indians, what they ate and whether they are the relatives of modern Chileans,” said Veronica Silva (Veronica Silva) from the National Museum of natural history of Chile.

the chinchorro Culture emerged about 10 thousand years ago the territory of modern Peru and Chile. The people lived in small villages, eating seafood, and led a fairly simple life. Chinchorro were one of the first tribes of South American Indians who mastered the technique of mummification. Scientists now believe that the Indians learned to make mummies because of climate change, which made the Atacama desert is more hospitable to life about 7 thousand years ago, when did this tradition.

in the manufacture of the mummy of the deceased have removed all the internal organs, brain and skin, and then the body was daubed with clay, and it was attached to the previously removed skin. It’s unclear why the Indians turned the dead into mummies — in their society did not exist in the funerary rituals and the cult of life after death.

Silva and her colleagues decided to reveal this mystery, examining how the mummy from the inside and looked like the people whose remains have survived to our days, analyzing the structure of their DNA and get the pictures of skulls and bones using computed tomography.

To solve this problem, the researchers took from the vaults of the Museum mummies 15 children and infants, each of which was “exploded” into thousands of virtual layers with a thickness of a millimeter or even less during the scan. These layers, as the scientists explain, would be merged later with the help of the computer.

Reconstruction and analysis data DNA to be obtained in the near future, will help to shed light on why the chinchorro Indians turned their loved ones into mummies, and reveal their modern “heirs”.