while bulldozing salt from the Chehrabad Salt Mine (Iran), miners came across a body with long hair, a beard and some artifacts.

In the winter of 1993, while bulldozing salt from the Chehrabad Salt Mine (Iran), miners came across a body with long hair, a beard and some artifacts.

These included the remains of a body, a lower leg inside a leather boot, three iron knives, a woollen half trouser, a silver needle, a sling, parts of a leather rope, a grindstone, a walnut, some pottery shards, some patterned textile fragments, and a few broken bones.

The body had been buried in the middle of a tunnel approximately 45 metres in length.

In 2004 another mummy was discovered only 50 feet away, followed by another in 2005 and a “teenage” boy mummy later that year. The oldest of the salt men found is truly ancient and has been carbon dated to 9550 B.C.

These “salt men” are in fact ancient corpses killed or crushed in the cave and mummified by the extreme conditions. Hair, flesh and bone are all preserved by the dry salinity of the cave, and even internal organs such as stomachs and colons have been found intact.