Smoke-Dried Remains In Asia May Be World's Oldest Mummies

Dating back as far as 14,000 years, these bodies were placed atop enormous fires that slowly smoke-dried them, leaving them deeply blackened yet frozen in time.

Preserving human remains is a practice that dates back to the prehistoric era and has been well documented in diverse societies around the world. However, a new study suggests that mummifying the dead may have started much earlier than experts once thought.

After studying prehistoric human remains across southeast Asia, scholars have determined that some of the dead were mummified by being smoke-dried over a fire. These remains range from 4,000 to 14,000 years old, making the oldest of them even older than the mummies found in Egypt or Peru — and thus the oldest-known mummies ever documented.

The Prehistoric Smoke-Dried Bodies O