Study suggests Southeast Asia may hold world’s oldest mummies, dating up to 12,000 years

Scientists report evidence that human remains from multiple sites across southeastern Asia may represent the oldest known mummies, potentially extending intentional mummification back as far as 12,000 years.

A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes human skeletons and partially preserved bodies from archaeological sites in China, Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Researchers said the remains were buried in crouched or squatting positions and bore cut marks, burn marks and skeletal signs of exposure to heat that are consistent with smoke‑drying, a process that can halt decomposition and preserve soft tissue.

"The practice allowed people to sustain physical and spiritual connections with their ancestors, bridging time and memory," said Hirofumi Matsumura of Sapporo Medical University, one of the study's authors, in an email. Matsumura and colleagues interpreted the archaeological and osteological evidence as indicating that hunter‑gatherer communities in parts of southeastern Asia developed deliberate smoke‑drying techniques that produced mummified remains millennia earlier than previously documented.

Until now, some of the oldest widely recognized intentionally prepared mummies were those of the Chinchorro culture on the Pacific coast of what is now Peru and Chile, dated to about 7,000 years ago. The new study, if confirmed, would push the origin of intentional mummification back by several thousand years and broaden its known geographic distribution.

The research team examined burial contexts, the positions of bodies, cut and burn marks on bones, and microscopic indicators that bone surfaces had been exposed to sustained heat. Those combined lines of evidence led the authors to conclude that the bodies had likely been smoke‑dried over fires before burial in some sites. The authors report variation among locations and note that practices were not necessarily uniform across the region.

Rita Peyroteo Stjerna, a human evolution specialist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the study, said the research represents "an important contribution to the study of 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.

Mummification can occur naturally in environments that inhibit decomposition, such as the arid sands of Chile's Atacama Desert or the peat bogs of northern Europe. Humans have also intentionally mummified the dead through embalming, smoke‑drying or other techniques for ritual, social and spiritual reasons. Egyptian mummies are among the best known, but archaeological research over the past decades has shown diverse mortuary practices worldwide.

The authors emphasize the cultural implications of their findings, arguing that the deliberate preservation of the dead would have helped prehistoric communities maintain ties to ancestors and structured social memory. The study documents a range of treatment of bodies, suggesting local traditions and varying degrees of intervention by the living.

The paper notes limitations and calls for further analysis. Radiocarbon and other chronological methods underpin age estimates, but the authors and external experts highlight the need for additional direct dating of preserved tissues and more extensive regional sampling to test how widespread and how consistent the smoke‑drying practices were. Detailed chemical and microscopic analyses could better distinguish deliberate smoke‑drying from other forms of heat exposure or post‑burial alteration.

Mummification practices continue in some Indigenous communities today. Researchers point to living traditions in parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea where smoke‑drying and other forms of body preservation are practiced for cultural reasons, underscoring continuity in funerary innovation and diversity.

If subsequent work confirms the new study's conclusions, the findings would expand current understanding of prehistoric mortuary behavior and suggest that early hunter‑gatherer groups in southeastern Asia independently developed techniques to preserve the dead long before the emergence of later, better‑known mummification traditions. The authors and outside specialists said continued excavation, more direct dating and broader regional comparisons will be necessary to determine the full scope and chronology of these practices.