“Mummies are like human time capsules - they give us lots of clues about our forefathers”

Most human bodies are either buried or burnt. Occasionally, by chance or design, human bodies are preserved for thousands of years as mummies.

National Geographic unwraps the story of mummies in Ancient Graves: Voices of the Dead – a captivating program that searches high and low throughout the world to find and learn from preserved bodies. These haunting human ‘time capsules’ have been uncovered all over the world.

Celtic ‘bog men’ whose skins were tanned while their bones dissolved make quite a contrast to the Peruvian mummies, freeze-dried in the arid mountaintops, but we can see equally well how these people lived and died.

Witness a modern mummy creation as an Egyptologist uses traditional, ancient instruments to preserve a recently deceased man, and hear from Native Americans who are demanding that desecration of their ancestors’ graves cease and that their bodies be returned immediately.

Some even reach a certain level of fame:

• The Ampato Maiden sacrificed on an Andes peak
  
• The Alpine Ice Man, the oldest frozen mummy ever found
• England’s 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man.

Others’ stories are known only to the ages, like a cache of elaborately adorned 7,000-year-old mummies unearthed in Chile, and the thousands of Egyptian mummies actually burned as train fuel in the 19th century.

Modern science now allows us to explore these human treasures without destroying them, and connects us all to the secrets of Ancient Graves: Voices Of The Dead.

Fascinating, if slightly disturbing, Ancient Graves: Voices of the Dead pulls back the shroud and gives a glimpse into the other side.