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Natural mummies are those that have been naturally mummified because of climatic conditions and soil that dehydrate the body. The world's oldest natural mummy has been at the center of a legal dispute for years. ( Tomas Castelazo | Wikimedia Commons )
The legal battle around the guard of a mummy has come to an end since the sequencing of its DNA reveals that it is a Native American descent. The mummy "Spirit Cave" is the oldest natural mummy in the world.
Legal battle about 'Spirit Cave Mummy'
After years of legal battle around the care of a 10,600-year-old natural mummy, she was finally handed over to the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe after an advanced sequencing of her DNA revealed that the so-called Spirit Cave mummy was actually related to a Native American. tribe.
The legal battle began in 1996 after radiocarbon dating revealed that the mummy was about 9,400 years old. A year later, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe tried to claim the body for immediate repatriation under the Amerindian Burial Protection and Repatriation Act, but was denied access because of the challenge of ancestry.
As a result, the tribe sued the federal government and a lawsuit ensued for 20 years. Anthropologists have argued that remains should remain on display in a museum because of his valuable knowledge of the early inhabitants of North America.
Native American descent
In 2016, scientists obtained permission from the tribe to perform a genetic analysis of the remains for the first time, which ultimately revealed that the remains were, in fact, related to Native Americans. With such discoveries, the remains were immediately repatriated to the tribe and buried.
"The tribe has real feelings for Spirit Cave, which as a European can be difficult to understand, but for us it would be a lot like burying our mother, our father, our sister or our brother." Professor Eske Willeslev, geneticist, who performed the DNA tests. "We can all imagine what it would be if our father or mother were exposed to an exhibition and they felt the same feeling for Spirit Cave."
The Spirit Cave mummy was first discovered in 1940 by Sydney and George Wheeler in a Nevada cave. It is the mummy of a 40 year old man at the time of his death. She was wrapped in a blanket and a reed mat. At the time, the remains were transferred to the Nevada State Museum.
The research is published in the journal Science.
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