For any of us, talking about mummies means a great deal of work and effort on the part of the Egyptian "mummifiers": the organs have to be carefully extracted and dried, the body covered with salt, forty days wait … However, nature it is more expeditious. All you need is extreme conditions of cold, salinity, acidity or aridity: with a good combination of these ingredients a natural mummification can be achieved. And, although we imagine that this only occurs in dry environments, it also occurs in swamps.
Mummified bodies from the Iron Age have been found in the sphagnum marshes – a moss that stores water inside up to twenty times its dry weight – in northern Europe. There the water is very acidic, and low temperatures and the absence of oxygen reign. In this case, the skin is preserved, although darkened, and the bones disappear, because the acid dissolves them.
