Left: the remains of an average woman on the Liyupo site in southern China, which was dried to smoke before the burial about 8,000 years ago. Right: a modern mummy dried to the smoke of the Dani people in western Papua, Indonesia,
Zhen li, hirofumi matsumura, hsiao-chun hung
Human bodies carefully preserved in smoking up to 14,000 years ago were found on archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, which makes them the oldest known mummies in the world.
A similar practice continues today among the Dani people in western Papua, in Indonesia. The Dani mummifies their deceased relatives by exposing the bodies to smoke, then keep them and venerate them as part of the household. Many of their mummies are closely linked to squatting poses.
Similar “hyper-flexed” human remains have also been found in Australia, China, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.
HSIAO-CHUN hung on, at the Australian National University of Canberra, says that if she worked on old skeletons in Vietnam in 2017, she was struck by the similarity of the remains of burial that they excited to the tradition of Dani.
Hung and his colleagues studied 54 burial burials from 11 archaeological sites located across Southeast Asia, dating from 12,000 to 4,000 years, to seek evidence of the skeletons that have been slowly smoked. Most sites were in northern Vietnam and southern China.
Many remains have shown clear signs to be partially burned, but not enough to have been cremated. The researchers then applied two analytical techniques – Diffraction of X -rays and infrared spectroscopy – to dozens of bone samples to reveal if they have been exposed to heat and how much.
Over 90% of 69 skeletal samples have shown evidence to have been heated. The results have shown that human leftovers had not been exposed to high heat but rather at low temperatures, indicating that they have been smoked for weeks or even months.
The oldest mummy tested by the team, from Hang Cho, in Vietnam, was over 11,000 years old. But skeletons of the same song and closely linked were also found on another site in Hang Muoi, Vietnam, dated over 14,000 years ago. “We did not test it by radiography or infrared because it was obviously partly burned, and we were able to be observed with the naked eye,” explains Hung.
So far, the oldest known mummified humans came from northern Chile, about 7000 years ago, and ancient Egypt 4,500 years ago.
Hung indicates that all the evidence indicates the probability that this type of funeral practice is widespread in southern China and Southeast Asia, withdrawing at least 14,000 years or even earlier, and continuing up to around 4,000 to 3500 years, when agricultural populations have become dominant in the region. The hyper flexus bindings of mummified bodies could have made them easier to transport, she said.
The ethnographic files indicate that tradition has persisted in southern Australia at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, said Hung. “And our own ethnoarchaeological studies in the highlands of New Guinea reveal that, in certain communities, this practice is still continuing today.”
“The results show that a unique combination of technique, tradition, culture and, above all, a deep belief and a lasting love for ancestors have persisted for an astonishing duration and spreads in a large region, from the Paleolithic era to the present day,” she said.
Vito Hernandez at Flinders University in Adélaïde, Australia, says that the study questions the long -standing hypotheses according to which early mummification practices have only appeared in arid areas like Atacama in South America or the Nile valley. “He emphasizes the role of tropical environments in the promotion of distinct mortuary traditions among the first modern humans to spread in the Far East and, potentially, in the Pacific,” he said.
“By extending the chronology of mummification of at least 5000 years before the Chinchorro culture [of South America]They highlight Southeast Asia as an independent center for cultural innovation and underline the deep cultural continuities connecting early Holocene hunters in the region with current Aboriginal groups in New Guinea and Australia, ”explains Hernandez.
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