Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption 'Recipe' for creating mummies in ancient Egypt revealed 
 
 Examination of a mummy has revealed the original ancient Egyptian embalming recipe - first used to preserve bodies. 
 
 A battery of forensic chemical tests carried out on a mummy that dated from 3,700-3,500 BC revealed the recipe and confirmed that it was developed far earlier and used more widely than previously thought. 
 
 The Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, is now home to the mummy in question. 
 
 The findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 
 
 Dr Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist from the University of York, told BBC News that this mummy "literally embodies the embalming that was at the heart of Egyptian mummification for 4,000 years". 
 
 Dr Buckley and his colleagues worked out the chemical "fingerprint" of every ingredient, although each element could have come from a number of sources. 
 
 So the basic recipe was: 
 
 a plant oil - possibly sesame oil; 
 
 a "balsam-type" plant or root extract that may have come from bullrushes; 
 
 a plant-based gum - a natural sugar that may have been extracted from acacia; 
 
 crucially, a conifer tree resin, which was probably pine resin 
 
 When mixed into the oil, that resin would have given it antibacterial properties, protecting the body from decay. 
 
 "Until now," he said, "we've not had a prehistoric mummy that has actually demonstrated - so perfectly through the chemistry - the origins of what would become the iconic mummification that we know all about." 
 
 How did scientists find the recipe? 
 
 Dr Buckley began searching for the recipe several years ago when he and his team extracted and analysed the chemicals from Egyptian textiles that had been used to wrap mummies. The textiles are part of an Egyptian collection at Bolton Museum in the north of England. 
 
 Image copyright Stephen Buckley/University of York Image caption Fabrics used to wrap Egyptian mummies provided the foundation for this study of ancient chemistry 
 
 Dating to around 4,000 BC, these particular fabrics were much older than the point at which it was believed that embalming and mummification originated. "Mummification in general supposedly started around 2,600 BC - when the Great Pyramid was being built," Dr Buckley said. 
 
 "But we observed that there was evidence that preservation of the body started earlier than this." 
 
 This discovery led the team to the prehistoric mummy in the Turin museum collection. It has never undergone any conservation treatments, so it provided a unique opportunity to study unpolluted ancient Egyptian chemistry. 
 
 Dr Jana Jones, Egyptologist and expert on ancient Egyptian burial practices from Macquarie University in Sydney, said: "The examination of the Turin body makes a momentous contribution to our limited knowledge of the prehistoric period and the expansion of early mummification practices as well as providing vital, new information on this particular mummy. 
 
 "By combining chemical analysis with visual examination of the body, genetic investigations, radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis of the linen wrappings, we confirmed that this ritual mummification process took place around 3,600 BC on a male, aged between 20 and 30 years when he died." 
 
 Why does it matter? 
 
 The fact that this same recipe was used almost 2,000 years later to embalm the Pharaohs, Dr Buckley said, means "we have a sort of Pan-Egyptian identity well before the formation of the world's first nation state in 3,100 BC. Its origins are much earlier than we thought". 
 
 It also reveals an insight into how and when the Ancient Egyptians perfected an antibacterial embalming recipe that protected and preserved their dead - leaving behind the iconic Egyptian mummies we are now so familiar with. 
 
 Embalming was just one step in the careful process of preserving a body. The key steps of mummification were: 
 
 Removal of the brain - possibly using a "whisking" process to cause the brain to liquefy 
 
 Removal of the internal organs 
 
 Putting the body into a natural salt to dry it out 
 
 Coating the body in the embalming recipe to kill bacteria and to seal it 
 
 Wrapping the body in linen 
 
 "It was the drying and the embalming recipe that were key to preservation," explained Dr Buckley. 
 
 "Egyptian mummification was at the heart of their culture." 
 
 He added: "The afterlife was just a continuation of enjoying life. But they needed the body to be preserved in order for the spirit to have a place to reside." 
 
 Follow Victoria on Twitter ||||| The mummy lays delicately curled in the fetal position. Though it now rests in a museum in Turin, Italy, it assumed its vulnerable pose thousands of years ago in Egypt, baked in the searing sands near the banks of the Nile. 
 
 Dating to some 5,600 years ago, the prehistoric mummy at first seemed to have been created by chance, roasted to a decay-resistant crisp in the desert. But new evidence suggests that the Turin mummy was no accident—and now researchers have assembled a detailed recipe for its embalmment. 
 
 Ancient Egypt 101 The Ancient Egyptian civilization, famous for its pyramids, pharaohs, mummies, and tombs, flourished for thousands of years. But what was its lasting impact? Learn how Ancient Egypt contributed to society with its many cultural developments, particularly in language and mathematics. 
 
 The ingredient list represents the earliest known Egyptian embalming salve, predating the peak mummification in the region by some 2,500 years. But this early recipe is remarkably similar to the later embalming salves used in extensive rituals to help nobles like King Tut pass into the afterlife. 
 
 “It's really interesting to see those connections,” says Stuart Tyson Smith, an archaeologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not part of the study team. “It gives us a nice piece of the puzzle that we didn't have before.” 
 
 “An Incredible Feeling” 
 
 The study, published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science, comes after decades of meticulous work with prehistoric mummies. Study coauthor Jana Jones, an Egyptologist at Macquarie University, got her first hints of this early mummification in the 1990s, when she was studying ancient mummy wrappings that date to roughly 6,600 years ago. 
 
 Jones peered at the wrappings under a microscope and was astounded: The cloths appeared to contain remnants of an embalming resin, a compound commonly seen in later mummies. “It was just an incredible feeling,” she says. 
 
 But microscopic evidence wasn't enough to say Egyptians embalmed their dead thousands of years earlier than previously thought. That required careful chemistry, and it took Jones and her team 10 years to complete the analysis. “That was just the curse of the mummy,” she quips. The team finally confirmed the find on the wrappings in 2014, publishing those results in PLOS ONE. 
 
 “That was the ground-breaking moment,” says Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist and expert in mummification who led the chemical analysis for both the 2014 study and this latest work. 
 
 But some experts remained skeptical, Jones says. The researchers lacked evidence from an actual mummy, since the textiles had long been separated from their preserved owner. So they turned to the Turin mummy for more clues. 
 
 Nail in the Sarcophagus 
 
 The Turin mummy—or “Fred” as he is often affectionately called—has been housed in Turin's Egyptian Museum since the early 1900s, and he had remained untouched by modern preservatives and unstudied by scientists. 
 
 The researchers subjected samples from the mummy to a battery of tests, teasing out the precise chemical components of the ancient embalming recipe. They found that the salve had a base of plant oils that was then mixed with plant gum or sugars, heated conifer resin, and aromatic plant extracts. The latter pair of ingredients are particularly important, since they stave off microbial growth. 
 
 The components of the paste not only resemble those used thousands of years later in Egypt, but they also bear a striking similarity to the chemistry of the salve researchers had identified in the prehistoric mummy wrappings. 
 
 “It's confirming our previous research, undoubtedly,” says Jones. 
 
 With their commonly curled positions and organs still inside their shriveled bodies, prehistoric mummies are a far cry from the classic entombed mummies that come to mind when you think of Egypt. But the basic idea behind an embalming salve remained the same. 
 
 The balm would have formed “sort of a sticky brown paste,” Jones says. Bandages were either dipped before wrapping, or the embalmer would directly smear the paste on the body. The mummy was then positioned in the hot sand so that a combination of the searing sun and balm preservatives would keep the body safe. 
 
 Later “classic” mummies were more often laid flat and interred in tombs far from the sun's rays. Because of this, Buckley says, the embalmers had to take additional measures, such as removing the brain and other organs, as well as desiccating the body with a type of salt called natron. 
 
 Recipe Reconstruction 
 
 The study also suggests that early embalming practices were much more widely spread than once thought. The wrappings analyzed in the earlier study hail from a part of Egypt that's over a hundred miles north of where the Turin mummy was likely preserved. 
 
 So how did ancient Egyptians figure out the recipe so long ago? 
 
 “Some of these ingredients may well have had a symbolic significance initially,” Buckley speculates. “But then they noticed that they had a preservative benefit.” The team is now studying sites of early experimentation with embalming ingredients, says Buckley, hinting at a future publication. 
 
 Ronn Wade, retired director of the anatomical services division of the University Maryland, praised the new study for its thoroughness. In 1994, Wade replicated the Egyptian mummification process on a modern human with support from a National Geographic grant. 
 
 “I wish we had some of this information when we were doing our mummy,” he says. “That would have been interesting.” ||||| A mummy that was long thought to have been naturally preserved showed traces of compounds that were commonly used in Egyptian mummification thousands of years later. 
 
 Embalming in ancient Egypt predated the pharaohs, an ancient mummy reveals. That would mean that the practice began at least 1,500 years earlier than once thought. 
 
 The mummy — an adult male curled on its left side in a fetal pose — is about 6,000 years old. It was previously thought to be naturally preserved by desert conditions at the site where it was buried. But the first-ever tests performed on the remains showed that the mummy was embalmed, making it the earliest known example of Egyptian mummification, researchers reported in a new study. 
 
 Further examination showed that the ancient embalmers used multiple ingredients to preserve the corpse, employing a similar recipe to the ones used 2,500 years later, when mummification in Egypt was at its peak. [Photos: The Amazing Mummies of Peru and Egypt] 
 
 More than a century ago, the mummy was discovered in Egypt. The exact location is unknown, though it is thought to have come from the ancient southern city of Gebelein on the Nile River, and represents a man who was about 20 to 30 years old when he died, the scientists reported. The mummy was acquired in 1901 by the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, and dates to 3700 B.C. to 3500 B.C., according to the study. 
 
 Neither the dealer who sold the mummy nor the museum that displayed it ever applied any type of conservation treatment to the fragile remains, "hence it provides a unique opportunity for analysis," the researchers wrote. 
 
 After embalming, the remains were wrapped in linen, placed in a shallow grave and surrounded with funerary objects. Credit: Raffaella Bianucci, University of Turin 
 
 Previously, the scientists had analyzed fragments of mummy funeral wrappings that came from another location, dating to approximately the same period as the Turin mummy, and they found traces of compounds that hinted at embalming procedures. But the Turin mummy provided researchers with a rare chance to hunt for similar evidence on a preserved body, lead study author Jana Jones, a research fellow with the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, said at a news briefing on Tuesday (Aug. 14). 
 
 The researchers sampled linen fragments from the mummy's torso and right wrist, as well as from a woven basket that had been buried alongside the remains. Plant oils and animal fats permeated the ancient fabric, and the scientists pieced together an embalming "recipe" from the compounds that they found, which included sugar or gum, conifer resin, aromatic plant extracts, and antibacterial agents. These ingredients were in similar proportions to those found in balms used during the dynastic period, according to the study. 
 
 The Turin mummy is so old that it even predates written language (the earliest known evidence of writing dates to about 3400 B.C.). So, it's likely that the embalming instructions were preserved verbally "and passed down through generations," Jones said at the briefing. 
 
 Not only did the mummy confirm that prehistoric Egyptians embalmed their dead, but it also placed the procedure in more than one location: The funeral wrappings that the scientists described in 2014 were found about about 124 miles (200 kilometers) away from the spot where the Turin mummy was likely buried, Jones said. 
 
 In pushing back the beginnings of Egyptian embalming by more than a millennium, the new findings offer tantalizing clues about social behavior, religious beliefs and scientific expertise in the region's prehistoric communities, Jones said. 
 
 "They had a well-developed belief in the afterlife — they wanted their bodies to be preserved," she explained. "And they had a knowledge of the science that went into preserving the body." 
 
 The findings were published online Wednesday (Aug. 15) in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 
 
 Original article on Live Science.
– He was probably in his 20s and died nearly 6,000 years ago in Egypt. Beyond that, not much is known about the mystery man—except that he has helped scientists rewrite the book on mummification. Chemical analysis reveals that whoever buried him also embalmed him, and that pushes back the start of the mummification practice about 1,500 years, reports Live Science. What's more, the "recipe" used to preserve the man is similar to the one that was in use about 2,500 years later, when the likes of King Tut and other pharaohs were laid to rest, reports National Geographic. The basic recipe, per the BBC: a plant oil such as sesame oil; a balsam-type plant or root extract; a plant-based gum, or sugar; and tree resin, which helped ward off bacteria. "Until now, we've not had a prehistoric mummy that has actually demonstrated—so perfectly through the chemistry—the origins of what would become the iconic mummification that we know all about," says archaeologist Stephen Buckley of the University of York. The mummy was discovered about a century ago and has been in the Egyptian Museum of Turin. It proved to be a perfect specimen to test because, crucially, no conservation efforts were ever used on it over the years. Live Science notes one interesting aspect of the dates involved: The man's death predated writing, meaning the formula for embalming had likely been passed down verbally from generation to generation. (Ever see a mummy tattoo?)