Smoking the Dead in Prehistoric SE Asia

"Stuff keeps on getting older" crows Graham Hancock referring to an article in 'Phys.org.News': Adithi Ramakrishnan, 'The oldest mummies in the world may hail from southeastern Asia and date back 12,000 years' 'Phys.org.News' September 15, 2025


A new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [of the USA] pushes tha date of the oldest known mummies in the world to examples in southeastern Asia dating back up to 12,000 years.

Researchers found human remains that were buried in crouched or squatted positions with some cuts and burn marks in various archaeological sites across China and Vietnam and to a lesser extent, from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Studying the bones further, scientists discovered the bodies were likely exposed to heat. That suggested the bodies had been smoke-dried over a fire and mummified by hunter-gatherer communities in the area.

Despite Hancock's enthusiam, Ramakrishnan notes criticism emerging that the dating methods used on the mummies could have been more robust and that from the actual evidence we have, it is not yet clear that mummies were consistently smoke-dried across all these locations in southeastern Asia. Today, indigenous communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea smoke-dry and mummify their dead and ethnographic evidence is used in the interpretation of the excavated remains from nine sites with confirmed mummification. The Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene remains relate primarily to hunter-gatherer groups and were stored in caves and rock shelters. The practice of mummification allowed people to sustain physical and spiritual connections with their ancestors, "bridging time and memory", as the paper puts it. The development of a distinct smoked mummification tradition is what would have been needed in humid East and Southeast Asia. These burials, often lacking grave goods, involved smoking corpses to preserve them, with evidence of tightly bound, flexed postures and occasional cut marks suggesting postmortem manipulation to aid binding or fluid drainage. Ethnographic parallels from the Dani and Anga peoples in Papua New Guinea show similar practices of smoking bodies over fires, with mummies displayed or stored rather than buried immediately. The archaeological evidence, including partially blackened bones and disarticulated remains, suggests a complex mortuary tradition involving smoking, delayed burial, and possible ritual defleshing.

The text proposes that smoked mummification may reflect a shared cultural tradition among early Homo sapiens populations across Southeastern Asia, New Guinea, and Australia, potentially dating back to their migration out of Africa. Genetic and craniofacial evidence supports a connection between these ancient hunter-gatherers and modern Indigenous groups, suggesting cultural continuity. Similar flexed burial practices are noted in Northeast Asia (e.g., Jomon Japan, Korea) and Australia, indicating a widespread tradition that may have persisted for millennia, linking physical preservation with spiritual beliefs.

Reference: Hung, Hsiao-chun et al (+22), Earliest evidence of smoke-dried mummification: More than 10,000 years ago in southern China and Southeast Asia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2515103122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515103122

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