Chile's Atacama desert mummies suffered Chronic Arsenic poisioning

[Ichingcarpenter]

Mummies from Chile’s Atacama desert ranging in age from 7,000 to 600 years old all show evidence of chronic arsenic poisoning.

The Atacama desert mummies are well-preserved by the near rainlessness of the environment, so a team of archaeologists from Chile’s Universidad de Tarapaca were able to analyze hair from 45 different mummies at ten sites in the area.


In the research, the team cleaned hair samples with de-ionized water, and then blasted them with lasers for chemical analysis. Some modern-day waters in the region have arsenic levels 100 times higher than the 10 microgram-per-liter limits recommended by the World Health Organization.

The arsenic is naturally-occurring in the region. It leaches into the watershed from adjacent salt lakes and volcanic materials. Local populations drank the water, harvested riverbed plants, fished in the rivers and along the coast, hunted sea mammals and birds, and ingested huge quantities of arsenic in the process.

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/5372

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/1995/03/chinchorro-mummies/arriaza-text

[Judi Lynn]

1. Information from your 2nd link is completely unexpected!

From your National Geographic reference:

Mention the word “mummy,” and you’re bound to evoke thoughts of ancient Egypt and the glittering tombs of pharaohs. Yet the Chinchorro people had been immortalizing their dead fully 2,000 years before mummification emerged in the Nile Valley. The earliest radiocarbon date obtained for a Chinchorro mummy, a child from a site in the Camarones Valley about 60 miles south of Arica, is 5050 B.C. During the next 3,500 years Chinchorro mummification evolved through three distinct styles—black, red, and mud-coated—before the practice died out.

Whereas the Egyptians considered only kings and other exalted citizens worthy of mummification, the Chinchorro accorded everyone in the community, regardless of age or status, this sacred rite. Infants—and even fetuses and newborns—received the same meticulous attention as adults.
Sad to learn the quality of life must have been far worse than we could have ever known, however, for these people, with the scant water resources also being poisonous. Unbearably cruel.