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  • Leonardo Miranda posted an image in the group Group logo of Paleo PicsPaleo Pics from the myFOSSIL app 3 years, 5 months ago

    3 years, 5 months ago
    3 years, 5 months ago

    Some stone age tools from Chile, South America. Collected by my parents who are former archaeologists and would uncover 10 000 year old Chinchorro mummies

    • Awesome specimens, did they say what they were used for?

    • @daniel-park rudimentary knives or cleavers. they are rather irregular you can see, instead of perfectly triangular like many indian spearheads. the south American natives remained quite primitive for a while, and had reached an Egyptian level of civilization as late as the 1000s and beyond, with the aztecs and incas

    • and yet, the Chinchorro were the first humans ever to invent mummification, 5000 years before Egyptians did it

    • That is crazy!! Do you have any papers I could read about them? I am thinking of doing an archaeology minor and am getting quite excited!!

    • most of what l learnt about them is from 12 pages of a national geographic issue, and some info from my parents @chloe-geddes . if you search on google, you might surely find info on them

    • l found the magazine again, and l must correct the age estimate. the culture ws about 7000 years old, not 10 000

    • @chloe-geddes the mummies went through an interesting process. they were fully defleshed, and the skeleton was reassembled and bound together with reed scaffolding and rope. the flesh was resculpted onto the bones with ash paste, which was then covered with a layer of human or animal skin. the whole body was then painted with black manganese paint. the end result looked like a man sized black clay sculpture of a person, with a molded face, a wig of the deceased’s original hair and the skeleton as a frame on which it was all built

    • Man! What a process! By ash paste do you mean that they cremated the flesh and made that into the paste? How did archeologists figure that out!

    • the ash paste was made by simply mixing ash and water and a protein binder (fish eggs, sea lion blood or fish glue) into a sculptable paste. not sure if the ash was from the cremated remains, or just any old ash. they probably threw away the viscera or fed it to the dogs if they had any. @chloe-geddes

    • their mummification process degraded over time though

    • when their culture was degrading, they started simply eviscerating the body, stuffing it with paste and painting it red

    • they had sacrificed their more sophisticated process that they used between 5000-3000 bc and did that for the last 1000 years before dying out entirely

    • they had sophisticated fishing equipment as they were a seaside tribe. beautifully carved hooks made of mussel shells, ring necked nets, weights, and for bigger fish they had bigger hooks worthy of tuna or marlin. a stone spear tip with backward pointing cactus quills, like a harppon tip

    • That is amazing

    • Incredible! amazing pieces with AMAZING history, and its awesome that your parents found them. really awesome pieces!

    • @jon-ferguson thanks for the praise! (these are not necessarily Chinchorro tools, l think they came from another ancient group. but my parents worked with many different archaeological finds including the Chinchorro people’s mummies)