In 1905, Louis Lortet and Claude Gaillard travelled from France to Luxor, an Egyptian city on the banks of the river Nile, to investigate the discovery of mummified monkeys in Gabbanat el-Qurud, a.k.a. ‘Valley of the Monkeys’.
Lortet and Gaillard, both Egyptologists, were able to retrieve 17 skulls and a large quantity of bones that belonged – surprisingly – to baboons. Baboons are not native to Egypt, and the scholars weren’t sure where they could have come from.
Indeed, for more than a century after their discovery, the origins of the baboons continued to puzzle scientists.
