Natural Mummification
Natural mummification occurs in favorable soils and climates, particularly cold, arid areas, ice, and peat bogs. Peat bogs have revealed naturally preserved corpses dating from as long ago as 840 b.c. Bodies of Inuit women and children dated at 500 years old have been found frozen in Qilakitsoq, in W Greenland. The frozen bodies of children, ritually sacrificed 500 years ago in Inca ceremonies, were found on Andean summits in 1995 and 1999. A Bronze Age woman of high rank was found frozen in a well-equipped burial chamber in Siberia. The most exceptional frozen specimen is the 5,300-year-old “Ice Man,” discovered during an unusual thaw in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991. Another find of a man in a melting glacier was made in NW Canada in 1999. The partially mummified body of the so-called Spirit Cave man, found in Nevada in 1940, was dated in 1996 as over 9,000 years old; Acha man, a mummy from the Atacama Desert, is of a similar age.
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