SLOW ROASTED

Scientists Find World’s Oldest Mummies in Surprising Location

Despite being most commonly associated with Egypt, mummification appears to have been going on long before and far away.

Smoked mummies 10,000 years older than the stereotypical bandage-bound specimens of Egypt have been found in a surprising part of the world. New research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal focused on 54 Neolithic burials across almost a dozen sites, with “large numbers of samples coming from Vietnam and China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and smaller numbers coming from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia,” according to NBC News. The burials revealed human remains in tight, crouching positions exhibiting signs of having been dried over fire—a process that causes mummification through slow heating. On Tuesday, Professor Peter Bellwood of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University and a co-author of the study, told the network: “We found that in southern China and Southeast Asia, there were many archeological sites that contain human burials that are between four and 14,000 years old.” He said the remains “belong to an original hunter-gatherer population that occupied Southeast Asia in Paleolithic times, and that continued in occupation in places like Australia and New Guinea through into current times.”