The earliest ancient Egyptians buried their dead in small pits in the desert. The heat and dryness of the sand dehydrated the bodies quickly, creating lifelike and natural ‘mummies’. Later, the ancient Egyptians began burying their dead in coffins to protect them from wild animals in the desert.

“It has to be really dry, or really wet, or really frozen, or really high elevation.” Bodies left in hot, arid environments can typically mummify in about two weeks, while the process typically takes a couple of months in enclosed locations.

Why did the Egyptians make mummies? The Egyptians believed in life after death. They believed that they had to preserve their bodies so they could use them in the afterlife. The Egyptians believed that when they died, they would make a journey to another world where they would lead a new life.

They found that high humidity levels allowed the microbes to flourish, and the mummies’ skin turned black and began to ooze, similar to the mummies in the collection.

The ancient Egyptian practice of preserving bodies through mummification is no longer the preferred method to pay homage to our dead, but it is still alive and well in research labs.

The miracle of mummification is how a body buried nearly 5,000 years ago could remain intact, while a non-mummified body decomposes into a pile of dust in just a few hundred years. The key is desiccation – removing all moisture from the body and storing it in an extremely dry environment.

The methods of embalming, or treating the dead body, that the ancient Egyptians used is called mummification. So successful were they that today we can view the mummified body of an Egyptian and have a good idea of what he or she looked like in life, 3000 years ago.

Chinchorro mummy

Ancient Egypt was a country rich in many natural resources but still was not self-sufficient and so had to rely on trade for necessary goods and luxuries. Trade began in the Predynastic Period in Egypt (c. 6000 – c. For most of its history, ancient Egypt’s economy operated on a barter system without cash.

Lady Dai Xin Zhui

Embalming does not preserve the human body forever; it merely delays the inevitable and natural consequences of death. In a sealed casket in above-ground entombment in a warm climate, a body will decompose very rapidly.

• 537 years ago – Inuit baby.
• 2,190 years ago – Xin Zhui.
• 2,200 years ago – Grauballe Man.
• 2,300 years ago – Tollund Man.
• 3,000 years ago – Ur-David.
• 3,000 years ago – Tocharian female.
• 3,335 years ago – Tutankhamen.
• 5,300 years ago – Ötzi the Iceman.

Ötzi, also called the Iceman, is the natural mummy of a man who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE, discovered in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps (hence the nickname “Ötzi”) on the border between Austria and Italy.

And now, after putting the stomach contents through a battery of tests, the researchers determined the ice mummy’s final meal: dried ibex meat and fat, red deer, einkorn wheat, and traces of toxic fern.

Otzi was found with a dagger, borer, flake, antler retoucher and arrowheads. But some of the stone was collected from different areas in Italy’s Trentino region, which would have been about 43.5 miles from where he was thought to live.

The 5,300-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman was discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991. Now, scientists have discovered he has at least 19 living Austrian descendants. The study, published in the journal Science, linked Ötzi with his living relatives by tracing a rare genetic mutation on the Y-chromosome.

Otzi was not a Neanderthal. Otzi was an anatomically modern Homo homo sapien who lived circa 5300 years ago during the Copper Age.

Ötzi died in a snow-free gully near the pass. Exposed on the surface, he freeze-dried, which led to the exceptional preservation of his body. A short time later, a glacier covered the area, and buried the body and the artifacts for more than five millennia, like in a time capsule.

No next-of-kin was around to claim the frozen 5,300-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman when it was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, but researchers now report that there are at least 19 genetic relatives of Ötzi living in Austria’s Tyrol region.

Results of the study also indicate that Ötzi was part of a larger population living in Europe, rather than a Sardinian son who had traveled far from a southern European site to reach the Alps. Ötzi’s mummified, frozen remains were discovered on an alpine glacier near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991.

A thorough scan of Ötzi The Iceman’s mummified body determined that his 61 tattoos served a medical purpose. At first, it was believed that the geometrical tattoos found on his body, which included assembled lines and one cross, had a spiritual meaning or cultural value important to his community.

Five millennia later, his remains — now known as Ötzi the Iceman — is getting what we think of as a cutting-edge treatment: A Belgian 3D printing shop called Materialise and a paleoartist named Gary Staab have cloned Ötzi’s body, found preserved in 1991 by hikers in the Italian-Austrian Alps, in exquisite synthetic …