Mummies have apparently been around over a millennium earlier than the scientific community previously believed -- meaning the developmental time line for early human civilizations may need to be reconsidered.

Researchers from the Universities of York and Oxford in the United Kingdom and Macquarie University in Australia say findings of their 11-year study push back the origins of mummification -- a central and vital part of ancient Egyptian culture -- by about 1,500 years, according to a UY news release.

Traditional theories about Egyptian mummification suggest in prehistory -- that is, the Neolithic and Predynastic periods between c. 4500 and 3100 B.C. -- bodies were preserved through comparatively natural processes -- mainly as a result of contacting the desert's hot, dry sands.

As well, scientific evidence suggesting the early use of resins in artificial mummification was, until the latest discovery, limited to isolated instances during the late Old Kingdom, approximately 2200 BC, but then gradually grew in frequency during the Middle Kingdom, which approximately lasted from 2000 to 1600 B.C.

The scientific team from York, Oxford and Macquarie detected complex embalming agents in linen wrappings from bodies taken from secure, well-documented tombs in one of the earliest ancient Egyptian cemeteries ever recorded, at Mostagedda, in the Upper Egypt region.

"For over a decade I have been intrigued by early and cryptic reports of the methods of wrapping bodies at the Neolithic cemeteries at Badari and Mostagedda," Jana Jones, a researcher from Macquarie, said in the news release. "In 2002, I examined samples of funerary textiles from these sites that had been sent to various museums in the United Kingdom through the 1930s from Egypt. Microscopic analysis with my colleague, Mr. Ron Oldfield, revealed resins were likely to have been used, but I wasn't able to confirm my theories, or their full significance, without tapping into my York colleague's unique knowledge of ancient organic compounds."

So, Jones initiated the research project and led the study jointly with Stephen Buckley, a York research fellow.

"Such controversial inferences challenge traditional beliefs on the beginnings of mummification," said Jones. The fact mummification chemicals were employed so early in history "could only be proven conclusively through biochemical analysis, which Dr. Buckley agreed to undertake after a number of aborted attempts by others," Jones continued. "His knowledge includes many organic compounds present in an archaeological context, yet which are often not in the literature or mass spectra libraries."

Buckley, a corresponding author for the research, used a combination of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and sequential thermal desorption/pyrolysis to identify a pine resin, an aromatic plant extract, a plant gum/sugar, a natural petroleum source and a plant oil/animal fat in the funerary wrappings.

In combination with each other, those embalming agents constituted complex, processed recipes for the same natural products, and similar proportions, used at the zenith of Pharaonic mummification about 3,000 years afterward.

"The antibacterial properties of some of these ingredients and the localized soft-tissue preservation that they would have afforded lead us to conclude that these represent the very beginnings of experimentation that would evolve into the mummification practice of the Pharaonic period," said Buckley. "Having previously led research on embalming agents employed in mummification during Egypt's Pharaonic period it was notable that the relative abundances of the constituents are typical of those used in mummification throughout much of ancient Egypt's 3000 year Pharaonic history. Moreover, these resinous recipes applied to the prehistoric linen wrapped bodies contained antibacterial agents, used in the same proportions employed by the Egyptian embalmers when their skill was at its peak, some 2500-3000 years later."