Living with the world's oldest mummies

"It may seem strange for some people to live on top of a graveyard, but we're used to it," says Ana María Nieto, who lives in the Chilean port city of Arica.

Arica, on the border with Peru, is built on the sandy dunes of the Atacama desert, the driest desert in the world.

But long before the coastal town was founded in the 16th Century, this area was home to the Chinchorro people.

Their culture hit the news in July when the United Nations' cultural organisation, Unesco, added hundreds of mummies preserved by them to its World Heritage List.

The Chinchorro mummies were first documented in 1917 by German Archaeologist Max Uhle, who had found some of the preserved bodies on a beach. But it took decades of research to determine their age.

Radiocarbon dating eventually showed that the mummies were more than 7,000 years old - more than two millennia older than the more widely known Egyptian mummies.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-58639748