Southeast Asians created the oldest known human mummies roughly 7,000 years before Egyptian mummies debuted, researchers say.
From around 12,000 to 4,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers across southern China, Southeast Asia and islands to the south and east bound the dead in crouched postures. They then slowly dried the bodies over smoky, low-temperature fires for several months, say archaeologist Hsiao-chun Hung of Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues.
Extended smoke-drying of bodies before burial represents a form of mummification observed historically among Indigenous Australian societies and even today in some parts of the New Guinea Highlands, the researchers report September 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Smoke-dried mummification may have developed from ancient beliefs that focused on preserving the bodies of revered ancestors. These poorly understood beliefs moved across southern Asia and possibly into Northeast Asia after human groups migrated out of Africa starting around 60,000 years ago, Hung suspects.
“The fact that smoke-dried mummification spread across such a vast area and endured for more than 12,000 years among Indigenous groups is remarkable,” Hung says.
South America’s Chinchorro people, who lived in a coastal desert, developed mummification techniques around 7,000 years ago. Chinchorro procedures included removing internal organs and brains before leaving bodies in the desert to dry out. Egyptians’ use of resins and other embalming substances to mummify the dead emerged as early as about 6,330 years ago.
Hung’s group studied the skeletons of individuals buried in tightly crouched or squatting postures at 95 sites, many in Southeast Asia and others on nearby islands, including Borneo and Java. In some cases, burned patches appeared on the skull or other bones.
Irregular bone charring and the careful positioning of largely intact skeletons indicated that people had heated dead bodies slowly over smoky fires, the researchers say. Continuous smoke exposure dried out and mummified corpses’ skins, helping to keep skeletons from falling apart.
Lab techniques for determining bones’ internal molecular structure, applied to 54 individuals from 11 sites, yielded evidence of prolonged heating at low temperatures.
Hung hopes to look for comparable signs of smoke-dried mummification in crouched bodies of individuals buried at southern Chinese and Southeast Asian sites dating to more than 20,000 years ago.
