The Oldest Mummies on Earth Are Chilean, Not Egyptian

The oldest deliberately preserved human body comes from a child buried near the Camarones Valley, on the Chilean coast, around 5050 BC. The Chinchorro fisherfolk who wrapped that body were doing it about 2,000 years before the first known Egyptian mummy went into a tomb.

The technique was not what most people picture when they hear the word mummy. The earliest Chinchorro practice — what archaeologists call the black mummy phase, c. 5000–3000 BC — pulled bodies apart entirely. Skin was peeled off. Organs and muscle were stripped out. The skeleton was reassembled around a wooden armature, the cavity packed with vegetable fiber and ash paste, the skin reattached, and the whole figure painted with black manganese. Later red mummies, around 2500–2000 BC, kept the body intact and worked through small incisions, then coated everything in red ochre.

The materials made this possible. The Atacama is one of the driest places on the planet, the soil shot through with nitrate salts that halt bacterial growth. Bodies left in the sand around Arica desiccate on their own — those are the natural mummies, with finds dated as early as 7020 BC. The Chinchorro saw what the desert was doing and decided to do it deliberately, with intention and color.

The German archaeologist Max Uhle pulled the first formal excavations out of Arica in 1914. By the time UNESCO listed the sites in 2021, around 282 mummies had been recovered, including a body with the oldest known tattoos in the Americas — a faint mustache-like mark dated to roughly 1880 BC. The Chinchorro never built pyramids. They built people, over and over, for three thousand years, in a stretch of desert most cultures would have walked away from.