A resident of a Colombian city was stunned to discover that her mother’s body had been naturally mummified after she died 30 years ago.
The incident was discovered in more than a hundred other bodies exhumed from San Bernardo Municipal Cemetery since the 1960s.
In many cases, the bodies still had their hair and nails intact, and in some cases they still had their skin tissue and eyeballs, which are typically among the first to be affected. dissolve after burial.
Locals have long believed that the bodies were mummified because of their active, agricultural lifestyle, or because they were too good while alive and were rewarded or punished.
But new research may have found a scientific explanation for the remains’ survival: it could be a combination of humidity and the steep mountainside on which the cemetery is located.
In the municipal cemetery of San Bernardo, people were discovered whose bodies were naturally preserved and mummified after burial (photo).
People were found with intact skin tissue and nails, leading researchers to wonder whether the steep mountainside on which the cemetery is located and the humid air helped preserve their bodies (photo)
Researchers cannot identify what triggered the mummification process and say the bodies were found in different parts of the cemetery and were among different age groups and genders.
The bodies were first discovered when they were exhumed from the San Bernardo Municipal Cemetery in 1963, and in the late 1980s about 50 mummies were found there each year.
Similar natural mummification has been observed in Guanajuato, Mexico, where underground gas and chemical composition of the soil keep the dead from rotting.
However, the deaths in Guanajuato date back to the first half of the 19th century, while the mummies in San Bernardo are relatively young.
Mummification involves a process of preserving the body after death by deliberately drying or embalming the flesh – but the bodies at San Bernardo were essentially mummified by accident.
After a body is buried, it takes only three to five days for the teeth and nails to fall out, but it can take up to ten years for the body to decompose, leaving behind a skeleton and traces of hair, skin tissue and clothing fibers.
But when Clovisnerys Bejarano dug up her mother in 2001, who had been buried 30 years earlier, she found her preserved and still in her funeral clothes, and said she could have simply been sleeping.
The body of Clovisnerys Bejarano’s mother (pictured) was exhumed in 2001, thirty years after she was buried
Bejarano’s mother (pictured) still had her skin tissue, hair and nails when she was exhumed, and researchers have been trying to figure out why and how these bodies were mummified.
Nails are one of the first things to fall off the body within three to five days of the deceased’s burial
The incident was discovered in more than 100 other bodies exhumed from the San Bernardo Municipal Cemetery since the 1960s.
“She still has her brown face, round, her braids, her hair,” Bejarano said AFPand added, “If God wanted to keep her… it must be for a reason.”
Bejarano’s mother is on display in the mummy museum of the Jose Arquimedes Castro Mausoleum, along with thirteen other bodies excavated from the San Bernardo Cemetery.
The cemetery removes bodies from the mausoleum every year to make way for the recently deceased.
But the living deceased must give permission for loved ones to be displayed in display cases; many have chosen to have the mummified bodies cremated.
Researchers investigating mummification have found no pattern for how or why the bodies were mummified – a process in which the body of a deceased person is embalmed or dehydrated.
A mummified body was excavated for the first time in San Bernardo Municipal Cemetery in 1963, and fifty preserved bodies were found annually in the late 1980s
The bodies were preserved in their entirety, leading many to wonder if the resident’s diet and active farming lifestyle contributed to the slowed decay.
A mummy in the mausoleum of San Bernardo has been preserved without the need for any chemical treatment that would be carried out during the mummification process
They reported that the bodies all came from different parts of the cemetery and belonged to different age groups and genders.
“When this all started, people were a bit in disbelief at what was happening; they thought these would be isolated events,” museum guide Rocio Vergara told AFP.
“As time went on, more and more bodies were found in this condition,” she said.
Initially, scientists thought the mummification might be due to the people’s healthy diet and their active agricultural culture, but one person brought back to the area from Bogota – a town about 40 miles from San Bernardo – contradicted this possibility.
Now researchers are turning to one of the few options they have left: the heat of the burial vaults combined with the elevated cemetery could mimic an oven.
However, anthropologist Daniela Betancourt from the National University of Colombia said this could be due to the mountain’s steep slope.
‘The wind blows all the time because it is warm.
“You can assume that the vaults act like an oven… they dry you out,” anthropologist Daniela Betancourt of the National University of Colombia told AFP.
“There is a lack of research into what happens and what specific circumstances cause people to mummify,” she said, adding that the theory still needs to be tested.
Regardless of the reason, some residents are happy that the bodies of their loved ones have been preserved.
“Most people who lose their parents put them in the ground or cremate them and can never see them again,” resident Pabon told police. New York Post in 2022 and said he visited his father’s remains every two weeks in 2015 after his body was found.
“But if I miss him, I can see him any time, and he is exactly how he was in life,” he added.