Schoolchildren Stumble Upon 7000-Year-Old Mummy

A group of young school children reportedly discovered a 7,000-year-old Chinchorro mummy while on an archaeology field trip in northern Chile over the holiday weekend.

Students enrolled in an archeology workshop for "at-risk youths" stumbled upon the ancient remains by chance on Saturday, according to Agence France Presse (AFP).

They had been on a fieldtrip to the Morro de Arica archeological site - a region that was already extensively excavated after the area had been hit by a 8.2 magnitude earthquake on April 1 - uncovering a number of archaeological artifacts in the resulting landslides.

According to local reports from La Tercera, the workshop students had been learning how to perform basic excavation work when a strange shape was noticed under some dog droppings.

Experts identified the mummy as a member of the ancient people living in the region back in the Chinchorro period (7020 BC to 1500 BC). According to Ancient Origins, experts have determined that, unlike ancient Egyptians, the Chinchorro people mummified everyone, although the reasoning behind this remains unknown. In many cases, archeologists have found that the Chinchorro people often delayed the final burial of their loved ones, carrying the mummies with them long before they were finally buried.

According to school teacher Hans Neira, who brought the 17 schoolchildren out to learn about their ancestry, he could not have found a better example for the day's lesson.

"Living in a tri-border area, these students find it harder to identify with their roots. By visiting archaeological sites, they witness their own history - the first inhabitants of the area and also from other eras," he told La Tercera, going on to add that the discovery of the mummy was especially exciting because it was of the Chinchorro people.

According to Neira, the Chilean National Heritage Office has now launched their own investigation of the area.