You're listening to Shortwave.

From NPR.

Seven thousand years ago, the hunter gathered Chinchoro people, thrived in the coastal

bays of one of the world's driest deserts.

But the rest of the world didn't know about them until the early 1900s, when German archaeologists

Max Ule visited the Atacama Desert in modern-day northern Chile.

Today, archaeologists Marcella Sapovada studies the Chinchoro people, but she says there's

not a lot for researchers to work with.

We don't have historic or right information because they are so ancient, they are the first

evidence of the inabitant of the coast of the northern Chile and the southern Peru.

Max Ule's first excavation of the Chinchoro beach in 1917, he uncovered evidence of a civilization

and it was kind of eerie.

What the team found were dozens of mummies.

Now, Marcella says one port city in this region of northern Chile,

Arrica, is a necropolis, a graveyard built above these mummies.

And she says that Chinchoro mummies are about 7,000 years old.

That's two millennia older than the Egyptian mummies.

We don't have any similar mummification techniques present in other tradition or region in the world.

Years after Max Ule's first excavation in 1917, the mummies were placed in a museum in Arrica

Chile, where they sat, only studied by a few researchers. That is, until the last decade,

when museum scientists noticed the mummies had started to decompose.

Some of the specimens were even turning to black ooze.

...