Smoked mummies found in Southeast Asia and China are the oldest mummies in the world, according to a study published Monday in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study says the mummies were dried up by cigarettes and squatted at funeral sites in Southeast Asia and China. The age of transnational researchers dates back 12,000 years, making them thousands of years older than the mummy found in Chile.
The researchers studied 54 funerals from 11 locations in Southeast Asia and China. The authors said in the abstract of the study that the techniques used to dry mummies were “similar to ethnographic ethnography in some Australian and Highland New Guinea societies”.
One author associates mummies found in Asia with the ancient hunter-gatherer population who predated the ancestors of today’s residents of the region.
Mummies “belong to the Paleolithic population of hunter-gatherers, occupied Southeast Asia during the Paleolithic era and continued to the current era in places like Australia and New Guinea,” Peter Bellwood, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the Australian National University in Canberra
According to the study, the mummies of the Chinchorro culture in northern Chile are considered the world’s oldest mummy, about 7,000 years old. According to the abstract of the study, the more famous mummies in the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt are about 4,500 years old.
