"The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated": 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest

Around 10,000 years before the Egyptians developed their sophisticated embalming practices, people in Southeast Asia were already mummifying the dead. According to new research, the mortuary tradition may have been developed by the direct descendants of the very first modern humans to reach the easternmost region of Eurasia, and persists to this day among certain Indigenous groups in Australia and Highland New Guinea.

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Previously, archaeologists had noticed that while Neolithic burials from ancient farming communities tend to be found lying on their backs surrounded by stone axes and other grave goods, pre-Neolithic corpses in Southeast Asia often display crouched or squatting postures. Not only do these earlier hunter-gatherer burials lack grave goods, but their state of preservation also suggests that they may have been desiccated prior to internment.

Using techniques like X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, the authors of a new study examined 54 pre-Neolithic burials from 11 sites across Southeast Asia. Dated to between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, the prehistoric cadavers showed signals of having been mummified via an extended period of smoke-drying over a fire.

“Smoked mummification takes about three months, during which time the body is slowly and continuously heated over a low fire,” said study author Dr Hsiao-chun Hung from the Australian National University to IFLScience. “This the first time any such evidence has been found of this kind of treatment being applied to dead people in Paleolithic times,” adds co-author Professor Peter Bellwood.

The researchers also confirmed that some mummies from Vietnam have been dated to 14,000 years ago, although these weren’t included in the present analysis. By contrast, mummification practices in Ancient Egypt didn’t begin until around 4,500 years ago, while mummies attributed to the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile date back some 7,000 years.

It is quite possible that we are seeing the descendants of the first modern humans in Southeastern Asia.

Professor Peter Bellwood

Unlike these arid locations, however, Southeast Asia is hot and humid, making mummification impossible without a considerable amount of human effort. Today, this endeavor is still undertaken by Indigenous groups such as the Dani of Indonesian New Guinea, who smoke corpses until they turn completely black, later keeping these mummies in special rooms inside houses and bringing them out on special occasions.

In contrast, the Southeast Asian mummies appear to have been buried relatively soon after the smoking was completed. “Presumably, when they mummified them, they would have put them in the ground fairly quickly, rather than sitting them around the place like people have tended to do in ethnographic times in New Guinea and Australia,” says Bellwood.

Nonetheless, the parallels between these cultural practices are striking and may hint at an ancestral connection between Palaeolithic Southeast Asians and present day Indigenous communities in Oceania. Unlike modern Southeast Asians – who mainly descend from populations that migrated southwards from China during the Neolithic – the mummy-makers are likely to be related to the very first Homo sapiens to arrive in the region after moving out of Africa. According to the researchers, Aboriginal cultures are also descended from this initial wave of modern humans.

“It is quite possible that we are seeing the descendants of the first modern humans in Southeastern Asia,” says Bellwood. “The oldest dating for these burials is about 14,000 years ago, and these people are, we think, very close to the ancestors of the people who live today as Indigenous Australians and New Guineans,” he continues. 

“We believe that the smoked-dried mummification tradition reflected a shared culture among hunter-gatherer populations since ancient times, likely with deep ancestral roots,” adds Hung. “I expect that we will uncover even more evidence, reaching farther back in time and spreading into other regions as well.”

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.