By the time the ancient Egyptians were wrapping their dead in linens and sealing them in golden tombs, a very different kind of preservation was already widespread across tropical Southeast Asia. Thousands of years earlier, hunter-gatherers there had discovered a way to cheat decay, not with desert air, but with fire and smoke.
Now, an international team of archaeologists has traced that practice back more than 14,000 years, making it the world’s oldest known tradition of deliberate mummification. Published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study presents the earliest evidence that humans were smoke-drying their dead long before the famous Chinchorro mummies of Chile or the embalmed pharaohs of Egypt.
“The results show that a unique combination of technique, tradition, culture, and above all, a deep belief and enduring love for the ancestors has persisted for an astonishing length of time,” said Hsiao-chun Hung, an archaeologist at the Australian National University and lead author of the study, as per New Scientist.
Bent Burials
The discovery began with a puzzle. Across dozens of cave sites in Vietnam, southern China, and Indonesia, archaeologists had long found human skeletons buried in tightly crouched positions—knees tucked against the chest, limbs folded in anatomically improbable ways. Some bones were scorched or blackened, as if exposed to fire. But unlike cremations, the bodies were not reduced to ash.
Traditionally, these burials were labeled “primary”—suggesting a single, intact burial event. But something didn’t sit right.
Co-author Hirofumi Matsumura, a physical anthropologist, was the first to notice that some of the skeletons uncovered in Vietnam were positioned in anatomically unusual ways.
The remains looked eerily similar to the smoked mummies still found today among the Dani people of Papua, Indonesia. There, family members preserve the dead by binding them in crouched postures and exposing them to low-temperature fires for weeks, sometimes months. The mummies are then kept in homes, cared for, and occasionally displayed.
In 2019, Hung and her colleagues traveled to the New Guinea Highlands to see these practices firsthand. What they found was strikingly similar to the ancient remains.
Testing the Bones for Smoke
To test whether ancient bodies were indeed smoked, the researchers analyzed 69 skeletal samples from 54 burials across 11 archaeological sites. Most dated from 12,000 to 4,000 years ago. Some were much older.
The team used two techniques—X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)—to detect changes in the bone structure caused by heating. Over 90% of the samples showed evidence of exposure to low, sustained heat. In many cases, only specific parts of the body (such as elbows, knees, or skulls) had been lightly charred. That pattern ruled out cremation.
Instead, it pointed to smoke-drying.
“Taken together, these XRD and FTIR results suggest that the examined individuals underwent a distinct form of heat treatment before burial,” the authors wrote.
The smoking process was likely prolonged and controlled, performed indoors in a special hut or home. In ethnographic examples, the process can take up to three months. Some ancient remains still showed soot-blackened surfaces or had the telltale color changes of smoke exposure without the signs of direct flame.
At the Hang Muoi cave in Vietnam, a charred clavicle was dated to around 14,000 years ago. That makes it—so far—the oldest known mummy in the world.
The First Sparks of Preservation
Until now, the oldest examples of artificial mummification came from arid deserts: the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile around 7000 years ago, and ancient Egypt from about 4500 years ago.
This new evidence shifts the spotlight to tropical Southeast Asia—a region long overlooked in global narratives of early innovation.
“They highlight Southeast Asia as an independent centre of cultural innovation,” said Vito Hernandez, an archaeologist at Flinders University who was not involved in the study, as per New Scientist. “And underscore the deep cultural continuities linking early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the region with present-day Indigenous groups in New Guinea and Australia”.
Indeed, these ancient people were similar to modern Papuans and Aboriginal Australians. Their traditions likely predated agriculture and outlasted it. The smoking practice appears to have endured for over 10,000 years.
The oldest smoked remains may be 14,000 years old, but the practice has not vanished. In remote highlands of Papua, families still keep mummies in homes. In the ethnographic record of southern Australia, smoked mummification persisted well into the 19th and even early 20th century.
This long chain of memory suggests something remarkable.
“Through this practice,” the authors wrote, “the smoked and preserved remains of the deceased allowed people to sustain physical and spiritual connections with their ancestors, bridging time and memory”.
In caves across tropical Asia, archaeologists have found charred bones and crouched skeletons showing that, long before empires or cities, people developed their own way of preserving the dead. They used smoke and fire to keep a lasting connection with their ancestors.
