Oldest known evidence of human mummification discovered in Asia, scientists say

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN

(CNN) — Hunter-gatherers in parts of ancient Asia prepared their dead for burial with smoke-drying up to 14,000 years ago, resulting in the oldest known evidence of human mummification, according to a new analysis of dozens of burials.

People around the world have long practiced mummifying, or preserving organic remains, using various techniques — including heat, smoke, salts, freeze-drying and embalming — to remove moisture from the body’s soft tissues and prevent decay. The remains from China, Vietnam and Indonesia that scientists investigated weren’t visibly mummified. However, examination of charring on the skeletons — which were buried after being tightly folded into squatting positions — showed signs that they had been exposed to low heat over long periods of time, which would have dried out and preserved the bodies.

Smoke-drying the deceased is a technique known historically from some indigenous Australian groups and still used by people within Papua New Guinea, researchers reported Monday in the journal PNAS. The similarities between the crouching poses of the skeletons studied in the latest analysis and those of modern smoke-dried mummies is what led the scientists to wonder whether the ancient crouching burials may have been smoke-dried, too.

Previously, the earliest examples of mummification came from the Chinchorro culture in northern Chile dating back around 7,000 years and ancient Egypt about 4,500 years. The findings from Southeast Asia push back the timeline of humans using mummification to preserve their dead by thousands of years, said lead study author Dr. Hsiao-chun Hung, a senior research fellow at Australian National University.

“We believe that the tradition reflects a timeless human impulse — the enduring hope, from ancient times to the present, that families and loved ones might remain ‘together’ forever, in whatever form that togetherness may take,” Hung told CNN in an email.

The findings also hint that hunter-gatherers had complex systems for dealing with the deceased “that may imply sophisticated beliefs about what should happen to the human body after death,” said Dr. Emma L. Baysal, an associate professor in the department of archaeology at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

“The authors have come up with a way of measuring the possible treatment of a dead body and identifying practices that are almost invisible to us today,” Baysal, who was not involved in the new research, told CNN in an email. “To make such a convincing argument from such difficult-to-spot evidence is impressive.”

An ancient and widespread tradition

The study team investigated 54 crouching burials that had previously been found at 11 archaeological sites. Working between 2017 and 2025, researchers described results from bones found in southern China, northern Vietnam, and Sumatra, an island of Indonesia. Similar burials have also come to light over the years in Sarawak in eastern Malaysia, southern Java in Indonesia, and northern Palawan in the Philippines, but those were not included in the new analysis.

From their own previous work and from other studies, the scientists knew that this extreme squatting posture — with the legs folded up tightly against the body — “was the most typical feature of pre-Neolithic burials, particularly in southern China and Southeast Asia,” Hung said. “Such burials are found usually in caves, beneath rock shelters, or within shell middens.” (The Neolithic Period, or Stone Age, in these regions lasted from approximately 7000 to 1700 BC.)

For years, the severe contortion of these skeletons had puzzled scientists. Senior study author Hirofumi Matsumura, a professor emeritus of physical anthropology at Japan’s Sapporo Medical University, “was the first to point out certain positions of the skeletons that seemed anatomically impossible,” Hung added.

The postures were so extreme that it was unlikely they had gotten that way without “extraordinary intervention,” hinting that the bodies had been manipulated before they were buried, the study authors wrote. So tightly were the bodies folded that most soft tissue — with the exception of dried skin — was likely gone by the time of burial. What’s more, bones in many of these burials were visibly charred.

Because only parts of the skeletons were blackened, the scientists ruled out that the bones were burned during cremation attempts. Charring that consistently appeared in specific locations on the bodies — on the elbows, the front of the skull and the lower limbs — provided intriguing clues. These bones are covered by thinner layers of muscle and fat and would have been more prone to burning if a body were placed over a fire.

However, most of the excavated skeletons showed no visible signs of burning. In those cases, “we needed to find a scientific way to test our hypothesis,” Hung said.

An interplay of technique, culture and belief

Two imaging methods — X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy — offered a closer view of the bones, revealing lingering signs of heat exposure that were invisible to the naked eye. The X-ray diffraction showed that the bones’ microstructure had been changed by heating, and the spectroscopy found evidence of prolonged low-temperature heating in about 84% of the samples. Some discolored areas on the bones that were not charred may have been blackened by smoke exposure, according to the study.

Based on these results and parallels to similar mummification practices in modern Papua New Guinea, the study authors proposed that people thousands of years ago prepared their dead for burial by arranging a body in a crouched pose over a low-temperature fire; heating it until smoke dried out the remains; then transferring the smoke-mummified body to its final resting place in a burial pit in a hut or natural shelter.

In total, bones from nine locations included in the new study showed signs of smoke-drying. The oldest potential example — an arm bone that showed telltale signs of burning — was from a site in northern Vietnam dating to around 14,000 years ago. Most of the samples came from burials that took place between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago.

“Our results reveal a unique interplay of technique, tradition, culture, and belief from pre-Neolithic cultures in southern China and Southeast Asia,” Hung said. “Remarkably, this practice has persisted across an astonishing span of time and throughout a vast region, from the late Paleolithic Age to the present. The extent and persistence of this practice are extraordinary.”

Among people in this part of the world, smoke-drying mummification was probably their best option for preserving the dead in humid environments — but those rituals may have originated among hunter-gatherers long before they settled there, Baysal added.

“It would be fascinating to know, in future, and with further studies in other regions, whether these practices are really related to shared ancestral groups and perhaps even to their movement into Asia from Africa,” she said.

Burial traditions are an important part of human culture, reflecting emotional connections between people. Those who performed this type of mummification would have invested significant time and energy. Family or community members continuously tend the mummy-in-progress for about three months, according to ethnographic records that describe modern examples of smoke-drying.

In the Neolithic Period and earlier, smoke-drying was “a commitment that could have been sustained only by profound love and spiritual devotion,” Hung said.

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