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A Tarim Basin mummy photographed circa 1910 Photo: Aurel Stein The door creaked open, and there in the gloom of the newly opened room, perfectly preserved despite the passing of thousands of years, a red-haired mummy with Caucasian features stared back. It was a life-changing moment for archaeologist Professor Victor Mair, and ten years on it still gave him chills. Mair had stumbled upon the recently discovered corpses of a man and his family in a museum in the Chinese city of Ürümqi, but the shock waves of the find would be felt far and wide. The 3000-year-old Cherchen...

Many of the 33 mummies uncovered near Chiclayo, Peru, were those of girls—a rarity, experts say. Their throats slit, the girls were probably killed in a bid for agricultural fertility. Research into 33 mummies discovered in Peru has revealed most of the bodies were girls, most likely sacrificed in the belief their deaths would bring fertility to the peoples farmlands. Utah Valley University professor Haagen Klaus is an expert in bio-archaeology and has been examining the human remains found in 2007 at the Chotuna Huaca, a site located north east of Chiclayo, Peru.

The discovery of Caucasoid mummies in China shows that East and West might have been meeting since the Bronze Age. Do they validate some of the ancient legends? Cherchen Man mummy Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first who broke down the barrier that was the Atlantic Ocean, that body of water that separated two continents. But no such barriers – whether natural or ideological – existed between Europe and the East – one could travel over land. Nevertheless, the discovery of Caucasoid mummies has provided not only indisputable evidence that Europeans travelled very far East, it has...

Little girl preserved in 1500s tomb packed with mummies - pictures By Emily Nash 30/01/2009 Resting peacefully in her coffin you'd think she'd died yesterday. But this little girl called Rosalina passed away in 1920 and her body has been kept perfectly preserved in a tomb packed with mummies that was first used in the 16th century. The pretty two-year-old, her matted blonde hair tied up with a ribbon, died of a bronchial infection. She is one of 2,000 mummified bodies buried in a catacomb at Palermo, Sicily. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/01/30/little-girl-preserved-in-1500s-tomb-packed-with-mummies-pictures-115875-21082253/

A lot of people seem to think that the world will end now that Obama is president. My attitude is, come on guys, what is the worst that could happen? Giving Obama the keys to the Whitehouse is like giving a two-year-old an Abrams tank. Sure, it's not the most prudent decision, but what damage could the little tyke possibly do? He's only got two years of experience! Unfortunately, Obama is much taller than your average two-year-old, which means he can reach places a two-year-old normally couldn't, such as the top shelf of the pantry, or the launch button of...

4,500-year-old mummies discovered in Chile Saturday, 28 June , 2008, 10:55 Santiago: Eight perfectly preserved mummies, believed to be some 4,500 year old, were found by workers engaged in a restoration project in Chile's far north, Spain's EFE news agency reported on Saturday quoting media report. "These mummies date back to between 2,000 BC and 5,000 BC." archaeologist Calogero Santoro told the daily El Mercurio. The mummies are remains of individuals belonging to the Chinchorro culture, which was one of the first to practice mummification and the perfect condition in which the mummies were found is indicative of their advanced...

Frozen Siberian Mummies Reveal a Lost CivilizationGlobal warming may finally do in the bodies of the ancient Scythians. by Andrew Curry That the warrior survived the arrow’s strike for even a short time was remarkable. The triple-barbed arrowhead, probably launched by an opponent on horseback, shattered bone below his right eye and lodged firmly in his flesh. The injury wasn’t the man’s first brush with death. In his youth he had survived a glancing sword blow that fractured the back of his skull. This injury was different. The man was probably begging for death, says Michael Schultz, a paleopathologist at...

Lice from mummies provide clues to ancient migrations By John Noble Wilford Published: February 6, 2008 When two pre-Columbian individuals died 1,000 years ago, arid conditions in the region of what is now Peru naturally mummified their bodies, down to the head lice in their long, braided hair. This was all scientists needed, they reported Wednesday, to extract well-preserved louse DNA and establish that the parasites had accompanied their human hosts in the original peopling of the Americas, probably as early as 15,000 years ago. The DNA matched that of the most common type of louse known to exist worldwide,...

Mystery Mummy A National Geographic Special about the mysterious 4,000 year old Caucasian Mummies found in China will air on The National Geographic Channel at 9:00PM EST tonight. Click here to see a short video on the subject.The DirecTV satellite channel number is 276. I have a number of books on this subject and will monitor this thread through-out the movie and discuss it with anyone who desires.

Russian archaeologists find unique mummies in Egypt 21:56 | 27/ 11/ 2007 AL-FAYUM, November 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russian archaeologists have found well-preserved mummies in Egypt dating to the country's Ptolemaic era, the head of the Russian Academy of Science's Egyptology department announced on Tuesday. "Well-preserved mummies of this period are extremely rare," Galina Belova said. The discoveries were made in the Egyptian oasis of Al-Fayum, where several mummies, combining traits of Hellenic and Egyptian traditions, have previously been found. Teams of Russian archaeologists are currently carrying out excavations in Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, in Alexandria on the...

LUXOR, Egypt - The face of King Tut was unshrouded in public for the first time on Sunday — 85 years after the 3,000-year-old boy pharaoh's golden enshrined tomb and mummy were discovered in Luxor's famed Valley of the Kings. Archeologists removed the mummy from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb, momentarily pulling aside a white linen covering to reveal a shriveled leathery black face and body. The mummy of the 19-year-old pharaoh, whose life and death has captivated people for nearly a century, was placed in a climate-controlled glass box in the tomb, with only the face and...

Trent University anthropologist reveals lifestyle clues of the ancient Inca of Peru Research undertaken by Trent University assistant anthropology professor Jocelyn Williams into the diets of recently unearthed mummies has revealed fascinating insights into the lives of the ancient Inca of Peru. An ancient cemetery containing the remains of 500-year old mummies was discovered underneath the coastal town of Tupac Amaru, located near Lima, Peru. Due to the extreme dryness of this coastal desert, the people buried there were exceptionally well preserved and many still retained their skin, hair, fingernails, eyelashes, and even tattoos. Prof. Williams sampled different tissues from...

Salt men to undergo surgery TEHRAN, Oct. 27 (MNA) -- The Archaeology Research Center of Iran (ARCI) plans to conduct a series of surgical operations on the ancient salt men of Zanjan’s Chehrabad Salt Mine, the Persian service of CHN reported on Saturday. The project is being undertaken to complete archaeological studies and carry out other scientific research on the unique mummies, ARCI director Mohammad-Hassan Fazeli Nashli said. The operations will be performed on the salt men’s soft tissue and entrails, which have remained intact due to the high quality of the mummification, he added. The project will be carried...

Peruvian archaeologists find 40 1,200-year-old mummies www.chinaview.cn 2007-09-20 10:55:40 LIMA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Archaeologists in Peru have found 40 mummies dating from the 1,200-year-old Chachapoyas culture in the Amazon fortress of Kuelap, project leader Alfredo Narvaez told local media on Wednesday. He said the mummies were discovered alongside Inca pottery, and that they showed signs of being affected by a fire in the archaeological complex, some 1,409 km northeast to the nation's capital. He said the bodies had been buried under a platform of 24 meters in diameter in the El Tintero structure during a dig of the Kuelap...

Source: North Dakota State University Date: September 10, 2007 Bog Mummies Yield Secrets Science Daily — Human remains yield secrets. Researchers, including Dr. Heather Gill-Robinson, assistant professor of anthropology at North Dakota State University, are now probing the secrets of 'bog mummies' some dating back 2000 years, preserved from the Iron Age with amazing detail in peat bogs of Europe. Dr. Heather Gill-Robinson of North Dakota State University, Fargo, studies several peat bog mummies in her research, including Damendorf man, discovered near Damendorf, Germany in 1900. Using CT scanning and other technology, Dr. Gill-Robinson has identified five lower vertebrae, a...

A Manchester scientist is the star of a documentary that unwraps the secrets of Egyptian mummies. Dr Angelique Corthals, a lecturer at Manchester Univeristy, has just returned from the New York premiere of Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs. The film, narrated by The Lord Of The Rings star Christopher Lee, was shown on the giant 88ft-diameter IMAX screen at the Liberty Science Centre. It will be released here in September... Dr Corthals, 34, a lecturer in biomedical and forensic studies in Egyptology, said: "It was a strange experience seeing myself on a screen the size of a three-story building. I'd...

Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummies (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. “It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it...

Tocharians The Tocharians were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BCE to the end of the 1st millennium CE. Their language is called Tocharian. Archaeology The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BCE until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century CE. "Tocharian donors", possibly the "Knights with...

Chile mummies possibly done in by arsenic Thursday, November 24, 2005; Posted: 10:58 a.m. EST (15:58 GMT) SAN MIGUEL DE AZAPA, Chile (Reuters) -- Living in the harsh desert of northern Chile's Pacific coast more than 7,000 years ago, the Chinchorro fishing tribe mysteriously began mummifying dead babies -- removing internal organs, cleaning bones, stuffing and sewing up the skin, putting wigs and clay masks on them. The Chinchorro mummies are the oldest known artificially preserved dead, dating thousands of years before Egyptian mummies, and the life quest of the archeologists who study them is to discover why this early...

"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said Georgi Poltavchenko, the Russian president's aide. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin." Khrushchev in 1962 ordered Stalin's remains removed from Lenin's Tomb, implying Lenin's remains were still sacred. But if Leninism had lost its importance in Russian political thought at the highest levels, if Russian public opinion abominated Lenin's memory, the founder of the Soviet Union would have been reburied in some...

Mummies of different epochs were among the finds Archaeologists digging at the ruins of Pachacamac in Peru say they have discovered a multi-level burial site. Mummy bundles of entire families were found in the graves from various eras, built on top of each other, they say. The researchers described the find as "exceptional" as the previously ignored cemetery had not been looted and is completely intact. Pachacamac, south of the capital, Lima, is thought to have been ruled by the Ychsma lords from 900 to 1470. The Incas turned it into a place of pilgrimage and it was abandoned after...

Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummiesM (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. “It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it...

St Pete researchers find tattoos on ancient Siberian mummies St PETERSBURG, March 28 (Itar-Tass) - Infrared photography methods, used for the first time by researchers at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, have made it possible to discover tattoos in ancient mummies excavated in the Pazyryk mounds in the south Siberian Altai Mountains. The mounds date back to the 8th to 5th centuries BC. The discovery was made on three mummies – two that used to be female bodies and one male body -- that were produced by special treatment for burial ceremonies. One more male mummy was found in...

The Sand Dune Forgotten by Time Archaeologists working in the extreme desert terrain of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have moved a step closer to unraveling the mystery of a 40-century-old civilization. They unearthed 163 tombs containing mummies during their ongoing and long excavation at the mysterious Xiaohe tomb complex. And it's all thanks to the translation of a diary kept by a Swedish explorer more than 70 years ago. "We have found more than 30 coffins containing mummies," said Idelisi Abuduresule, head of the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute and the excavation team. The complex is believed to...

THE LEGEND OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH: MYTH, MEMORY, AND A MUMMY By C. Wyatt Evans University Press of Kansas , $24.95, 224 pages, illus. REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER Was John Wilkes Booth really killed by Sgt. Boston Corbett in the barn on the Garrett farm in southern Maryland, or did he escape and spend the rest of his life as a homeless, friendless wanderer, winding up, finally, as a side show mummy in a traveling carnival? Or, on the other hand did he escape to England and die there? And the second question: Why did he murder Lincoln in the...

CAIRO, Egypt - Excavators discovered 20 gilded mummies in the Bahariya oasis in western Egypt, the government's council of antiquities said Tuesday. The find brings the total number of gilded mummies recovered in the 2,000-year-old cemetery to 234. The site, known as the Valley of the Golden Mummies, was discovered in 1996. Zahi Hawass, head of antiquities council, said excavators also discovered the tomb of Badiherkhib, the grandson of former Bahariya Gov. Jed-Khunsu. Jed-Khunsu's tomb already has been found. Fifty bronze coins were found with the mummies, the statement said. Survivors were believed to leave the money for the deceased...

Just a point of curiosity, has anyone got any extensive information about the mummies of Urumchi? I found some 5 year old websites making a few talking points about them, but nothing detailed as to origins or anything. Comments and discussion please, keep links to a minimum.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- Two mummified bodies found in an abandoned, burned-out mortuary have a story as eerie as Halloween: They were known as Pap and Molly, and legend had it that they stabbed each other to death in the 1930s. A passer-by spotted the corpses this week in the remains of the Shortridge Funeral Home, reviving memories of the mummies for longtime residents who had seen them at the mortuary decades ago. Police summoned to the scene Wednesday night initially checked to see if foul play was involved. After roping off the area and waiting for daylight, they removed...

A new robot, currently being designed by a Singaporean university, will hopefully explore the bowels of the Great Pyramid next year, a noted Egyptologist said on Wednesday. "The manufacturing of the robot will start in October, with the university footing the bill. The exploration will likely start next year," Zahi Hawass, chairman of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters. "Stone doors inside the Great Pyramid could not just be there as an ornament. They must have a function and hide something behind them," he said. "They could not just be there for dead King Cheops (Khufu) to slip...

LONDON (Reuters) - Ancient Egyptians revered cats and other animals and took as much care in preparing them for their passage to the next life as they did with humans, scientists said on Wednesday. A study of animal mummies from tombs dating back thousands of years showed the ingredients the Egyptians used to preserve them were the same as those used for humans. "The sorts of compounds we were finding indicate they were embalming them in the much same way, with some exotic ingredients," said Richard Evershed, an expert in archaeological chemistry at the University of Bristol in southwest England....

Aug. 27, 2004Man lay dead in bed for two yearsCondo fees and bills were still being paidBody finally found in mummified state WINNIPEG—His telephone number was still listed in the telephone directory and his condominium fees and bills were automatically being withdrawn from his bank account. No one knew Jim Sulkers had died in his bed almost two years ago. Neighbour Sam Shuster said residents in the complex often wondered where the man they knew only as Jim had gone, but were told his condominium fees were still being paid. "How can that happen, for God's sake. Two years!" Shuster said...

Chinese Lady Dai leaves Egyptian mummies for dead By Yu Chunhong (chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2004-08-25 08:59 People all over the world think of Egypt when talking about body preservation and mummies, but how many people know that the best preserved bodies in the world are actually in China? The body of Lady Dai [special to chinadaily.com.cn] According to some scientists, what the ancient Chinese were able to achieve in body preservation leaves the Egyptians in their dust. The body of Lady Dai of the Western Han Dynasty, housed in the state of the art Hunan Museum, attracts flocks of visitors every...

Siberian Graveyard's Secrets YEKATERINBURG, Russia In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates - burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before. . Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The cold, dry permafrost preserved the remains, and the copper may have helped prevent oxidation. . The discovery adds...

Two of the oldest mummies found in Peru - so well preserved that one had an eye and internal organs intact - have gone on display after their discovery by building workers two weeks ago. Officials from the National Institute of Culture said the mummies - a young boy and a man in his mid-30s - were at least 700 years old. They came from a culture that predated the Incas, who dominated a vast swathe of South America from Colombia to Chile until they were toppled by Spanish invaders in the 1530s. Well preserved ... one of the recently...

Friday, Jan. 16, 2004. Relics of Ancient Burial Rites Reveal Siberian Trade Route By Charles Q. Choi New York Times Service YEKATERINBURG, Russia -- In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates -- burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before. Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The...

Surprise find has archeologists smiling December 21 2003 at 06:03PM Cairo - French archeologists have discovered 19 mummies as well as wood and limestone sarcophagi in an ancient Egyptian burial ground south of the capital, antiquities officials said Sunday. The secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawwas, said in a statement that a mission from the Louvre Museum in Paris found the antiquities in the Saqqara region, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Cairo. Also found were statuettes and pieces of fabric, he added. These items date to the Late Dynastic Period, or about 1 000...

Team finds secret of mummies' preservation October 22 2003 at 05:18PM By Chris Slocombe London - A German research team has unravelled the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead, using sophisticated science to track the preservative to an extract of the cedar tree. Chemists from Tuebingen University and the Munich-based Doerner-Institut replicated an ancient treatment of cedar wood and found it contained a preservative chemical called guaiacol. "Modern science has finally found the secret of why some mummies can last for thousands of years," Ulrich Weser of Tuebingen University told Reuters on Wednesday. The team extracted the...

Egypt Uses Science to Dispel Pharaonic CurseFri September 12, 2003 02:41 AM ETBy Tom Perry CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt will use science to dispel the curse of the pharaohs, which popular myth blames for the deaths of those who have opened the tombs of Egypt's ancient rulers, Egypt's antiquities chief said. Zahi Hawass told Reuters a study would examine unexcavated tombs for dangerous substances, gases or germs, to explain the curse, whose fame spread in the 1920s following the death of a British aristocrat who entered King Tutankhamun's tomb. "At one of my excavations ... I found inscriptions telling us...

Mummified children's bodies found at Polish flat WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish police said on Monday they had arrested a couple after discovering the corpses of their four children at their flat, three of them in barrels and at least two of them mummified. It was not known how long the children, two newborns and nine-year-old twins, had been dead. "All evidence indicates that the children were killed by the parents. The cause of death...was drowning," said Dariusz Krawczyk, a police spokesman in the central city of Lodz. Police discovered the corpses on Saturday when they were searching for a suspected...

Curses! Mummy Tale Not True Fri Dec 20, 2:53 PM ET By Amanda GardnerHealthScoutNews Reporter FRIDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthScoutNews) -- Tut tut to those who believe in the mummy's curse. Reuters Photo According to a study reported in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, there is no mummy's curse associated with the opening of the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt. The study confirms what other experts have long suspected. "I've never had any weird experience with a mummy, and I've worked with them for 30 years," says Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University's...

<p>BROOKVILLE, New York (AP) -- When a severed human hand arrived in his mailbox, Bob Brier wasn't horrified or shocked. He thought it might be something cool to bring to work.</p> <p>Brier is a professor of Egyptology and a renowned mummy expert, and the hand was a gift from a woman whose father had purchased it in 1926 in Egypt from locals touting it as an ancient mummified hand.</p>