Scientists identify possible world’s oldest mummies in southeastern Asia dating to 12,000 years ago

Scientists reported Monday that human remains recovered from multiple sites across southeastern Asia show signs of deliberate preservation and may represent the oldest known mummies in the world, with some specimens dated as far back as about 12,000 years.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes skeletons buried in crouched or squatted positions that bear cut marks, burn traces and other indicators that the bodies were exposed to heat. Lead author Hirofumi Matsumura of Sapporo Medical University said the pattern of modifications and thermal alteration is consistent with intentional smoke-drying over fires by hunter-gatherer communities, a practice that would have slowed decomposition and preserved the dead.

Researchers assembled and analyzed remains recovered from archaeological sites across China and Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The bones display consistent patterns of modification, including incisions and scorched surfaces, and laboratory analysis found evidence of heating that the authors interpret as deliberate smoke exposure before burial.

If the dates and interpretations are confirmed, the findings would push back the earliest known deliberate mummification practice by several millennia. Until now, some of the oldest widely recognized artificially prepared mummies came from the Chinchorro culture, a fishing people of what is now coastal Peru and northern Chile, whose elaborate mummification dates to about 7,000 years ago.

"This practice allowed people to sustain physical and spiritual connections with their ancestors, bridging time and memory," Matsumura wrote in an email accompanying the study. The researchers argue that smoke-drying provided a practical means to preserve bodies in tropical and subtropical environments where rapid decomposition normally destroys soft tissue and obscures evidence of mortuary treatment.

Human evolution expert Rita Peyroteo Stjerna of Uppsala University, who was not involved in the research, noted that the findings are an important contribution to understanding prehistoric funerary practices but urged caution. "Dating methods used on the mummies could have been more robust and it’s not yet clear that mummies were consistently smoke-dried across all these locations in southeastern Asia," she said in an email.

The study authors relied on a combination of stratigraphic context, radiocarbon dates from associated materials and analyses of bone surface alteration to infer both age and treatment. They report a wide temporal and geographic spread of the modified burials, indicating that smoke-drying and other forms of corpse modification may have been practiced intermittently by diverse foraging groups across the region.

Mummification can also occur naturally under specific environmental conditions. The story of preserved human remains includes naturally mummified bodies from dry deserts, such as Chile’s Atacama, and waterlogged bogs in parts of northern Europe. Distinguishing natural preservation from intentional treatment requires careful assessment of cut marks, burning patterns, burial placement and contextual dating.

The new report complements ethnographic and historical records indicating that smoke-drying and other preservative techniques have continued into recent times among some Indigenous communities. Scientists note that modern examples of deliberate mummification persist in Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea, where cultural practices include exposing the dead to smoke for ritual and ancestral purposes.

The authors say the evidence calls for renewed attention to prehistoric funerary diversity in Asia and for more systematic application of dating and biochemical methods to confirm timing and technique. Outside specialists recommended follow-up studies that apply more extensive radiocarbon sampling and microscopic analyses of bone and associated materials to strengthen the chronological framework and test whether the smoke-drying interpretation holds across the full set of sites.

The report underscores that complex mortuary behavior — including techniques to preserve the dead for social, spiritual or commemorative reasons — was not limited to agricultural or sedentary societies and may have emerged among mobile hunter-gatherers earlier than previously documented.