Mar 10, 2015 04:57 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A multi-institutional team of scientists is working to preserve the oldest known mummies in the world, as they are in danger of degrading amid a rising global temperature.

According to a Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) news release, the Chinchorro people were mummifying their people thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians did so for their pharaohs.

Now it appears as though climate change over the past decade or so is contributing to these mummies' degradation.

"We knew the mummies were degrading but nobody understood why," Ralph Mitchell, a biology professor emeritus at Harvard SEAS, said in the release. "This kind of degradation has never been studied before. We wanted to answer two questions: what was causing it and what could we do to prevent further degradation?"

Chile's University of Tarapacá is currently holding 120 Chinchorro mummies, which radiocarbon dating places as far back as 5050 BC. If correct, they would be the oldest known manmade mummies.

"In the last ten years, the process has accelerated," Marcela Sepulveda, a professor of archaeology in Tarapacá's anthropology department, said in the release. "It is very important to get more information about what's causing this and to get the university and national government to do what's necessary to preserve the Chinchorro mummies for the future."

For the study, Mitchell and his team were able to study samples provided by Sepulveda.

"The key word that we use a lot in microbiology is opportunism," Mitchell said. "With many diseases we encounter, the microbe is in our body to begin with, but when the environment changes it becomes an opportunist."

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