Georgia Wheeler’s work in 1940 was still yielding information sixty years later, when the genetics revolution finally caught up to the desert cave where she had spent a day in the spring of that year.

The Science Of Ancient Mummies

The Spirit Cave individual’s state of preservation — partial mummification rather than complete skeletal reduction — was the result of a specific combination of environmental factors that operated on the burial for more than ten thousand years.

Mummification, in the general archaeological sense, refers to any process by which the soft tissues of a dead body are preserved beyond their normal rate of decomposition.

This can happen in multiple ways: deliberate treatment with chemicals or other preservatives (as in ancient Egypt), extreme cold that essentially freezes tissues indefinitely, the specific chemistry of certain bogs and peat deposits, or — as in the Spirit Cave case — extreme desiccation in an arid environment.