There were several steps to the Egyptian ritual of mummification that were important for preserving a body: After thoroughly washing it in the waters of the nearby Nile River, specialists would remove several internal organs from the body. We have also learned a lot about early animals and humans from individuals that were naturally preserved, thanks to a fluke burial in sediment or ice. (although older purposefully mummified remains have been found elsewhere, such as ones dating to about 5050 B.C. The oldest evidence of Egyptians performing mummification dates to about 3500 B.C. Ancient Egyptians believed that preserving the body was an important preparation for one’s afterlife.
In this activity you will learn about the science behind the process of mummification by mummifying a hot dog.Ī mummy is a corpse-human or other animal-whose tissue has been preserved, whether intentionally by a process developed by humans or in nature by an accident of chemistry or weather. But in ancient Egypt and in other cultures, mummification was a serious religious burial ritual. Other volcanoes usually spew silicates, but the Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only one on the planet that spills "natrocarbonatites" as cool, runny, dark washes.Mummies are frequently featured in movies and television shows-often playing the part of a scary, undead monster.
It's a favorite among petrologists because it's the only one of its kind, Hannes Mattsson, a researcher at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, told NBC News. The culprit is Ol Doinyo Lengai, a million-year old volcano just south of Lake Natron. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery A calcified dove, from Nick Brandt's book Across The Ravaged Land, published by Abrams, New York.
How did the lake get this hostile? The "salt" in it isn't the regular table variety harvested from seawater, but magmatic limestone that's been forged deep in the Earth, poured out in runny lava flows and blasted into the air to become ash clouds 10 miles high. Water levels fluctuate easily because it's so hot - when the levels drop, the corpses are left behind on the shores, coated in salt, exactly how Brandt found them. Small birds or bats that try and fail to cross the 12- by 30-mile lake fall in, as do insects like beetles and locusts. Flamingos are some of the lucky birds that can make the trip across the lake which is 30-miles wide at its longest point. "If a body falls anywhere else it decomposes very quickly, but on the edge of the lake, it just gets encrusted in salt and stays forever," David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester who has visited Lake Natron four times, told NBC News.
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