Particle.news
Download on the App Store
28 ARTICLES
·
2d ago

Smoke-Dried Mummies Across Southeast Asia Rewrite Mummification’s Origins

Lab analyses detected prolonged low-temperature heating on bones consistent with bodies being dried over smoke before burial.

Image
Image
Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian in Long’an, located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Left: Middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China who was smoke-dried prior to burial. Note: Bone fragments belonging to a second individual have been digitally removed from the lower left corner; Right: Modern hyper-flexed, smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people, kept in a private household in the Baliem Valley of Wamena, Jayawijaya Regency, Papua (Indonesia).

Overview

  • An international team reports in PNAS that hunter-gatherers practiced deliberate preservation between roughly 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, with some remains locally dated to about 14,000 years.
  • The survey reviewed about 95 sites and conducted laboratory tests on 54 individuals from 11 locations, primarily in southern China and northern Vietnam with additional samples from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
  • Bodies were tightly bound in extreme crouches and appear to have been dried over smoky, low-temperature fires for weeks to months before interment.
  • X‑ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy identified microstructural changes and heat signatures consistent with prolonged low-temperature exposure on most tested bones, though a minority showed higher-temperature effects.
  • The authors link the practice to ethnographic traditions in New Guinea and parts of Australia, while external experts urge stronger dating and caution that bone heating alone may not prove intentional mummification in every case.