World’s Oldest Mummies: 10,000-Year-Old Smoke-Dried Bodies Found in Southern China and Southeast Asia – The Secret of Ancient Preservation Revealed!

In a groundbreaking PNAS study published September 15, 2025, researchers led by Hsiao-chun Hung have documented the earliest known artificial mummification on Earth: smoke-dried human remains from hunter-gatherer societies in southern China and Southeast Asia dating back more than 10,000 years—predating the famous Chinchorro mummies of Chile by millennia and Egyptian practices by roughly 7,000 years.

Analyzing 69 bone samples from 54 pre-Neolithic burials across 11 sites in Guangxi (China), Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the team identified clear signatures of deliberate low-temperature smoking. Bones showed microscopic heat alteration, charring patterns, and microstructural changes consistent with prolonged exposure to smoky fires, not natural decomposition or cremation. Many remains were тιԍнтly bound in crouched or squatting “fetal” postures before burial—sometimes with evidence of post-mortem dismemberment—suggesting a ritual process to preserve the body for ancestor veneration.

The oldest examples, including a middle-aged man from Guangxi dated >9,000 years ago, represent the world’s earliest confirmed mummification technique. This practice endured for over 10,000 years (12,000–4,000 years ago) among mobile forager communities genetically and culturally linked to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians and New Guinean Highlanders—where similar smoke-drying rituals persist today.

“This is the first archaeological proof of a sophisticated, region-wide mortuary tradition that predates all other known artificial mummification,” Hung and colleagues state. Far from simple burials, these “smoke mummies” reveal deep spiritual beliefs about death, continuity, and the body’s role in the afterlife among Pleistocene-Holocene hunter-gatherers.

The discovery upends ᴀssumptions that complex body preservation emerged only with agriculture or complex societies. Instead, it highlights remarkable cultural continuity and ingenuity in pre-farming Asia. As more sites are examined, these ancient “living” corpses continue to rewrite the global story of how humanity first learned to defy decay.