LONDON (Reuters) — Ancient Britons started mummifying their dead at around the same time as the ancient Egyptians, according a British archaeologist.
Dr Mike Parker-Pearson, who will feature in a BBC documentary "Meet the Ancestors" on Tuesday, discovered four Bronze Age bodies showing signs of mummification in the remote Scottish isle of South Uist.
The 3,000-year-old bodies are believed to be the first ever discovery of mummification in Britain.
"The Cladh Hallan bodies lay beneath the floor of a Bronze Age roundhouse, deep underneath layers of old jewelry, whalebone lamps and tools, and deeper still under animal remains," said a BBC preview on Sunday.
Unwrapping a mystery
While the Egyptians used hot sand and natural salts to preserve their dead and ancient Peruvians cured their dead in dry mountaintop winds, Parker-Pearson believes Britons used naturally-occurring acids in peat bogs.
Wrappings have since rotted, but proof they were mummified comes from the fact that the bodies were gutted and carbon dating shows them to have died up to 600 years before burial.
Only mummification could have prevented them from rotting in the meantime.
"The female, bizarrely, held two of her own front teeth in her hands," said the preview.
"So-called bog bodies found preserved in peat bogs are distinctive by their leathery skin and the almost complete absence of bones which are eroded and dissolved over the years by the bogs' complex chemicals," it added.
