Though we tend to think that the ancient world was teeming with violence, is that idea actually accurate?
A new study of millennium-old mummies says yes. It states that two of the three South American specimens involved in the investigation showed signs of being brutally murdered.
Was violence widespread within the ancient world? It’s a question that some scientists have attempted to answer through the analysis of ancient remains. Yet, although skulls and skeletons have already revealed that more than 20 percent of the remains of South American males show signs of violent struggles, mummies remain a relatively untapped source for this sort of information.
For one of the first times, a team of researchers recently implemented non-invasive imaging techniques to study three separate millennium-old mummies from South America.
"We show lethal trauma in two out of three South American mummies that we investigated," says Andreas Nerlich, a study author ...
