Peru : Revealing the origin of the mummies found in the Nazca Desert

Experts from the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Peru revealed the strange origin of the mummies found in the Nazca Desert in 2023.

Expert Flavio Estrada Moreno pointed out at the Peruvian Ministry of Culture conference held on Friday, January 12, that the results of analyzes conducted by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Forensic Sciences of the mummies, which were previously considered strange creatures, showed that the mummies were made of the remains of humans and animals.

He says: "The mummies' fingers were made of human bones. They were presented as being of alien origin, which is completely untrue."

According to him, the results of the X-ray examination showed that the skull of one of them belonged to a mammal and its bones belonged to birds.

“They resemble llama or alpaca skulls that can be found in archaeological cemeteries of Peruvian civilizations, such as the Nazca civilization, which existed until the sixth century AD,” he says.

Commenting on the presence of egg-shaped objects in the stomach of one of the mummies, the scientist indicated that they were in fact a stone.

It should be noted that the Peruvian Minister of Culture, Leslie Orteagui, indicated in September 2023 that the Nazca mummies were made from skeletal remains dating back to the pre-Hispanic period. According to her, a criminal case has been opened regarding the removal of these remains from the country.

It is well known that human activity is warming the planet, causing more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and changing ecosystems at an extraordinary rate.

But the record-breaking temperatures in 2023 have alarmed scientists, and indicate that there are some “mysterious” new processes that may be underway, according to what NASA’s chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt told AFP.

Schmidt, who is also director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that the temperature recorded in 2023 "was not just a record. It was a record that broke the previous record by a record margin."

He added: “We started with La Niña (or El Nino), this amazing phenomenon in the tropical Pacific Ocean. This continued until March. And then in May, we began to see the development of El Niño, which is the warm phase of that cycle.”

El Nino and La Nina are two climate phenomena, each one different from the other. The El Nino phenomenon is characterized by the movement of huge masses of hot water in the tropical ocean from east to west, while the La Niña phenomenon works the opposite, and arises from the rush of this hot water towards the east from the Indian Ocean, Asia, Indonesia, and Australia.

On Friday, January 12, climate scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed data showing that temperatures continue to rise at alarming rates, contributing to extreme weather events around the world.

The vast majority of climate scientists agree that this long-term trend is linked to global warming, and usually affects temperatures in the following year, which is 2024.

"What we've seen in 2023 is that global temperatures appear to be rising with El Nino, in a much larger way than we've seen before," Schmidt continued. "The long-term trends that we understand, they're driven by greenhouse gases, they're driven by human impacts. And we expect that to continue," Schmidt continued. Decade after decade, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which we have not done yet."

According to what he told Agence France-Presse, the mysterious factors in rising temperatures can be linked to aerosols, the El Niño phenomenon, events in the Antarctic or North Atlantic Ocean, or an energy imbalance on Earth, among many other hypotheses.

Scientists are now desperately trying to figure out what they are missing.

For the first time, all 365 days in 2023 were more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels. Scientists say the year's climate was uncomfortably close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, threatening to breach the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

However, the previous year, ten different climate forecasting centers predicted a very low probability that the annual temperature of 2023 would be as high as it turned out to be.

El Nino has been building for the past year, but it appears to be doing so in a weaker way than in the recent past. This strongly suggests that the record temperatures seen in 2023 were not solely due to climate change and El Nino together.

"Maybe El Nino is enough," Schmidt explained. "But if you look at all the other El Ninos we've had, none of them have done this. Either this El Nino is very special, or the atmosphere responds to El Nino in a very special way. Or there's something there." "Another is happening. And no one has yet quantified the range of these possibilities."

He added: “This long-term trend is still within the limits of what we expected for many years. But the details of what happened in 2023 are a bit vague.”

He stressed that “the year 2023 did not follow the old patterns. If the old patterns return, and the year 2023 was just a passing point, then the year 2024 will be very close to the year 2023. If it is not a passing point, or it is something systematic that has changed, or is changing, then we expect that it will be "2024 is already much warmer. This has implications for weather, heat waves, heavy rains, and coastal flooding."