Amazing stuff!
"Archaeologists have discovered that people in Southeast Asia were smoke-drying their dead as early as 14,000 years ago, making them the world’s oldest known mummies and predating Egypt by millennia."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
This finding documents smoke-dried mummification of the dead, mostly in tightly bound crouched postures, from archaeological contexts between 12,000 and 4,000 y old across a vast region encompassing Southeast Asia, southern China, and beyond.
The practice continued into the ethnographic record in the New Guinea Highlands and parts of Australia.
The oldest of these burials predate the mummification associated with the Chinchorro culture (7,000 cal. BP, northern Chile) and Ancient Egypt (Old Kingdom, cal. 4,500 BP).
Our burial samples from Southeastern Asia highlight a remarkably enduring set of cultural beliefs and mortuary practices that persisted for over 10,000 y among hunter-gatherer communities who were related through their craniofacial attributes and genomic affinities to Indigenous New Guinea Highland and Australian populations.
Abstract
In southern China and Southeast Asia (collectively, Southeastern Asia), Terminal Pleistocene and Early to Middle Holocene (ca. 12,000 to 4,000 cal. BP) hunter-gatherer burials feature tightly crouched or squatting postures, sometimes with indications of post-mortem dismemberment.
Such burials contrast strongly with the extended supine burial postures typical of subsequent Neolithic inhumations in these regions. Their contorted postures, often with traces of burning, present interpretive challenges.
This study uses multiple techniques, including X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, to investigate 54 pre-Neolithic burials from 11 archaeological sites located across Southeastern Asia.
The findings confirm that many of these pre-Neolithic flexed and squatting burials were treated by an extended period of smoke-drying over fire, a process of mummification similar to that recorded ethnographically in some Australian and Highland New Guinea societies. Some of the analyzed archaeological samples represent the oldest known instances of such artificial mummification in the world."
The oldest human mummies were slowly smoked 14,000 years ago "For at least 10,000 years, humans across South-East Asia were being carefully preserved after death by being smoke-dried – a tradition that continues to this day in some cultures"
Oldest evidence of mummification uncovered by ANU experts (original news release)
Earliest evidence of smoke-dried mummification: More than 10,000 years ago in southern China and Southeast Asia (open access)
Left: The remains of a middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China, who was smoke-dried prior to burial about 8000 years ago.
Right: A modern smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people in West Papua, Indonesia
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