The world’s oldest human mummy was created by smoke-drying corpses in Southeast Asia and China 10,000 years ago.
Studies of dozens of ancient tombs found in China, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia reveal that many of the skeletal structures found in the right fetal position were treated by drying smoke for a long period of time before it was buried. The study was published on the Journal PNAS on Monday (September 15th).
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Researchers were confused by the large number of burials in China and Southeast Asia, between 4,000 and 12,000 years ago, when the skeleton was distorted in a “radical” or unnaturally crouched position. A similar skeleton discovered in Portugal in 2022 was interpreted as evidence of mummification because it was radical. This is because once the body is broken down, it is likely that it is bound to allow it to move its arms and legs beyond its natural limits.
However, in many ancient Southeast Asia burials, researchers found there was evidence that they were burning in skeletons rather than graves suggesting a kind of ritual treatment of the body, including fire and smoke.
Researchers used X-ray diffraction, a nondestructive technique that allows scientists to investigate the internal microstructure of materials, and used infrared spectroscopy to assess whether bones were exposed to heat. Many of the skeletons revealed evidence of low-strength heating and discoloration from soot rather than direct burning such as cremation. This suggests that professional funeral practices, including smoking corpses, are likely to be widely practiced in pre-agriculture communities in southern China and Southeast Asia, the researchers wrote.
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Today, the mummies that have been smoked in parts of Southeast Asia are still being made, according to researchers. They traveled to Papua, Indonesia in 2019 and observed that the ticks and pumo people made mummies of the deceased’s ancestors by firmly restraining the bodies, setting them on fire, and smoking them until they were completely black. Using these examples, researchers concluded that ancient individuals were closely restrained after death and smoked for a long period of time on cold fires.
The only deceased individuals the researchers investigated in the study are bones with unpreserved skin, soft tissue and hair, but they thought the bodies were mummified because they were intentionally mummified by drying the smoke.
“The important difference from the mummies we typically imagine is that these ancient smoked bodies were not sealed in containers after the process, and therefore their preservation generally lasted only decades to hundreds of years,” Hang said. In the hot, humid climates of Southeast Asia, smoking is likely the most effective way to preserve corpses, she said.
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But these ancient hunter-gatherers “remain a charming and thought-provoking mystery” by smoking the human body, Hang said, “We cannot say for certain whether smoking was considered the first way to maintain it.” Ancient people may have accidentally discovered smoking as a by-product of some kind of ritual practice, or applied it to humans who first smoked animal meat and then died.
“What is clear is that practices prolong the visible presence of the deceased, allowing ancestors to make a living in concrete ways.
Moving two-layer model
Mummies could also support a “two-tier” model of early migration to Southeast Asia. This model is based on the idea that ancient hunter-gatherers came as a wave of migrants 65,000 years ago as a wave of people migrating, unlike the Neolithic farmers and burial traditions that did not arrive until 4,000 years ago. The ancient hunter-gatherers who used smoked burial practices may have produced a modern population in Southeast Asia, including the mites and pumo people who still practice this form of funeral ritual.
Ivy Hui Yuan Ye, a biologist at Nanyang University of Technology, was not involved in the study, but she told Live Science in an email that the new findings support the two-layer model and “conform to patterns of migration, distribution and interaction in early Asian humans.”
If radical burials identified across Southeast Asia can be interpreted as smoked mummies, this is “the smoked mummies may have been more widely popular than they are currently identified in archaeological records,” the author wrote.
In fact, the process of smoke drying a corpse could introduce “deep and lasting biological and cultural continuity,” from the early expansion of homo sapiens from Africa to Southeast Asia, and potentially 42,000 years ago.
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