Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian (A: M14, B: M19, C: M20) in Nanning and Liyupo (D: M23, E: M24, F: M28) in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. All individuals are in flexed positions, with several exhibiting hyper-flexed postures (A and E: male, B–D and F: female).
They say that when you dig deep enough, the earth always tells a story—one that often clashes with stories written by humans. A recent archaeological discovery in southern China and Southeast Asia is one of those earth’s stories, and it’s a loud one. Scientists have found human remains, deliberately smoke-dried and ritually treated, dating back between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. These mummified remains, buried in tight, crouched postures, were mummified by being exposed near low-oxygen smoky fires — not cremated, but preserved by ritual smoke-drying techniques.
A point I've made several times in these blog posts, but one which is worth repeating, is that any archaeology which predates the supposed date of the Biblical genocidal flood is irrefutable evidence that no such flood ever happened, because it simply wouldn’t be there—or at best would be buried under a thick, global layer of silt. Similarly, any archaeological evidence that predates the supposed 6-day creation of the universe is irrefutable evidence that no such creation event happened according to the Bible’s timeline.
Lastly, anything which refutes the Bible’s timeline, or contradicts the occurrence of events described in it, is irrefutable evidence that the Bible could not have been written by the omniscient, omnipotent creator god it claims to describe. So, this recent discovery, reported by a team of archaeologists from Australian, Chinese, and Japanese universities, in reported open access in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is about as conclusive evidence as you could wish for that the Bible was not written by the god described in it. Any claim that it is an inerrant textbook of science and history is undoubtedly false. The lead author of the paper, Hsiao-chun Hung, Senior Research Fellow, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University, has explained the research and its significance in an article in The Conversation. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
12,000-year-old smoked mummies reveal world’s earliest evidence of human mummification
A middle-aged woman, discovered in a tightly flexed position at the Liyupo site in southern China, preserved through smoked mummification.
Hsiao-chun Hung
Smoke-drying mummification of human remains was practised by hunter-gatherers across southern China, southeast Asia and beyond as far back as 12,000 years ago, my colleagues and I report in new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is the earliest known evidence of mummification anywhere in the world, far older than better-known examples from ancient Egypt and South America.
We studied remains from sites dated to between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, but the tradition never vanished completely. It persisted into modern times in parts of the New Guinea Highlands and Australia.
Hunter-gatherer burials in southern China and Southeast Asia
In southern China and Southeast Asia, tightly crouched or squatting burials are a hallmark of the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the region between roughly 20,000 and 4,000 years ago.
Archaeologists working across the region for a long time have classified these graves as straightforward “primary burials”. This means the body was laid to rest intact in a single ceremony.
Hunter-gatherer burials in a crouched or squatting posture have been found across southern China and southeast Asia.
Combined with this observation, we often saw some bones in these bodies were partly burnt. The signs of burning, such as charring, were visible mainly in the points of the body with less muscle mass and thinner soft tissue coverage.
We began to wonder if perhaps the deceased were treated through a more complicated process than simple burial.
A casual conversation in the field
A turning point came in September 2017, during a short break from our excavation at the Bau Du site in central Vietnam.
The late Kim Dung Nguyen highlighted the difficulties of interpreting the situation where skeletons were found, likely intentionally placed and seated against large rocks. Matsumura noted problems with their bone positions.
The team excavating an ancient hunter-gatherer cemetery in Guangxi, southern China.
Hsiao-chun Hung
Matsumura thought about this idea seriously. Thanks to generous support and cooperation from many colleagues, that moment marked the real beginning of our research into this mystery.
How we identified the ancient smoked mummies
With our new curiosity, we began looking at photographs of modern smoked-dried mummification practices in the New Guinea Highlands in books and on the internet.
In January 2019, we went to Wamena in Papua (Indonesia) to observe several modern smoked mummies kept in private households. The similarity to our ancient remains was striking. But most of the skeletons in our excavation showed no outwardly obvious signs of burning.
A modern smoke-dried mummy kept in Pumo Village, Papua (Indonesia).
Hsiao-chun Hung.
Then came the COVID pandemic, which led to travel restrictions, preventing us from travelling anywhere. My colleagues and I were spread across different regions, but we sought various ways to continue the project.
Eventually, we tested bones from 54 burials across 11 sites using two independent laboratory techniques called X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. These methods can detect microscopic changes in the structure of bone material caused by high temperatures.
The results confirmed the remains had been exposed to low heat. In other words, almost all of them had been smoked.
More than 10,000 years of ritual
The samples, discovered in southern China, Vietnam and Indonesia, represent the oldest known examples of mummification. They are far older than the well-known practices of the Chinchorro culture in northern Chile (about 7,000 years ago) and even ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom (about 4,500 years ago).
Remarkably, this burial practice was common across East Asia, and likely also in Japan. It may date back more than 20,000 years in Southeast Asia.
It continued until around 4,000 years ago, when new ways of life began to take hold. Our research reveals a unique blend of technique, tradition and belief. This cultural practice has endured for thousands of years and spread across a very broad region.
A visible form bridging time and memory
Ethnographic records show this tradition survived in southern Australia well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the New Guinea Highlands, some communities have even kept the practice alive into recent times. Significantly, the hunter-gatherer groups of southern China and Southeast Asia were closely connected to Indigenous peoples of New Guinea and Australia, both in some physical attributes and in their genetic ancestry.
In both southern Australia and Papua New Guinea, ethnographic records show that preparing a single smoked mummy could take as long as three months of continuous care. Such extraordinary devotion was possible only through deep love and powerful spiritual belief.
This tradition echoes a truth as old as humanity itself: the timeless longing that families and loved ones might remain bound together forever – carried across the ages, in whatever form that togetherness may endure.
Hsiao-chun Hung, Senior Research Fellow, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Significance
This finding documents smoke-dried mummification of the dead, mostly in tightly bound crouched postures, from archaeological contexts between 12,000 and 4,000 y old across a vast region encompassing Southeast Asia, southern China, and beyond. The practice continued into the ethnographic record in the New Guinea Highlands and parts of Australia. The oldest of these burials predate the mummification associated with the Chinchorro culture (7,000 cal. BP, northern Chile) and Ancient Egypt (Old Kingdom, cal. 4,500 BP). Our burial samples from Southeastern Asia highlight a remarkably enduring set of cultural beliefs and mortuary practices that persisted for over 10,000 y among hunter-gatherer communities who were related through their craniofacial attributes and genomic affinities to Indigenous New Guinea Highland and Australian populations.
Abstract
In southern China and Southeast Asia (collectively, Southeastern Asia), Terminal Pleistocene and Early to Middle Holocene (ca. 12,000 to 4,000 cal. BP) hunter-gatherer burials feature tightly crouched or squatting postures, sometimes with indications of post-mortem dismemberment. Such burials contrast strongly with the extended supine burial postures typical of subsequent Neolithic inhumations in these regions. Their contorted postures, often with traces of burning, present interpretive challenges. This study uses multiple techniques, including X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, to investigate 54 pre-Neolithic burials from 11 archaeological sites located across Southeastern Asia. The findings confirm that many of these pre-Neolithic flexed and squatting burials were treated by an extended period of smoke-drying over fire, a process of mummification similar to that recorded ethnographically in some Australian and Highland New Guinea societies. Some of the analyzed archaeological samples represent the oldest known instances of such artificial mummification in the world.
Prior to the spread of Neolithic populations ancestral to the majority of living East and Southeast Asians, a spread that occurred mainly between 5,000 and 3,500 y ago, the previous hunter-gatherer populations of Southeastern Asia followed a complex set of activities for the mortuary treatment of their deceased community members. Despite some regional variations, pre-Neolithic burials in Southeastern Asia feature predominantly flexed, tightly crouched, or squatting burial postures, often with signs of tight binding of the remains (1–6). Most of these burials are primary rather than secondary, and many display evidence for some degree of burning of the bones. Others are described as exhibiting evidence for possible dismemberment or mutilation, presumably post-mortem. Such observations raise interesting questions about mortuary practices in these pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies of Southeastern Asia.
One of these questions relates to the traditional classification of two distinct burial categories as used in the bioanthropological literature. Typically, primary burials involve the direct interment of a deceased individual in the ground shortly after death, without significant post-mortem alteration. In contrast, secondary burials often involve complex processes such as cremation, or rearrangement of loose skeletal elements. However, many of the burials that we discuss in this paper straddle these primary/secondary definitions and challenge conventional paradigms. Questions have persisted about how ancient people in southeastern Asia achieved the distinctive burial postures of the deceased and what specific post-mortem treatments were applied.
To investigate these questions, we analyzed human bone samples from 95 pre-Neolithic archaeological sites plotted in Fig. 1. Large numbers of these samples come from northern Vietnam and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China (Fig. 1, Insets A and B), with smaller numbers reported from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Beyond the boundaries of Fig. 1, such flexed and squatting burials are also reported from hunter-gatherer archaeological contexts in northern China, Korea, Jomon Japan, Australia, and indeed in many regions elsewhere in the world (7–12).Fig. 1.
Recorded hunter-gatherer sites with flexed and squatting burials in Southeastern Asia from the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene. 1. Gaomiao, 2. Niupodong, 3. Zhaoguodong, 4. Qihedong*, 5. Daowei 1, 6. Xiaoma, 7. Jiaoziyan, 8. Zengpiyan, 9. Miaoyan, 10. Dayan, 11. Xingyi, 12.Baida, 13. Gexinqiao, 14. Beidaling, 15. Liyuzui, 16. Fengyan, 17. Huangmenyan, 18. Xiankezhou, 19. Baxun, 20. Liyupo, 21. Changtang, 22. Lingwu, 23. Huiyaotian, 24. Qingshan, 25. Dingsishan, 26. Qiujiang, 27. Xijin, 28. Ganzao, 29. Hecun, 30. Jiangbian, 31. Chongtang, 32. Lang Cuom, 33. Mai Da Nguom, 34. Pho Binh Gia, 35. Hang Doi, 36. Dong Thuoc, 37. Hang To 1, 38. Hon Hai Co Tien, 39. Cai Beo, 40. Liyudun, 41. Dong Can, 42. Du Sang, 43. Lang Gao, 44. Hang Cho, 45. Hang Muoi, 46. Xom Trai, 47. Hang Mang Chieng, 48. Hang Con Moong, 49. Hang Diem, 50. Mai Da Dieu, 51. Mai Da Nuoc, 52. Hang Lang Bon, 53. Da But, 54. Con Co Ngua, 55. Banyan Valley Cave, 56. Spirit Cave, 57. Tham Lod, 58. Ban Rai, 59. Doi Pha Kan, 60. Ban Tha Si, 61. Quynh Van, 62. Pha Phen, 63. Yingdun, 64. Bau Du, 65. Krong No, 66. Bubog-1, 67. Ille Cave*, 68. Duyong Cave, 69. Sa’gung, 70. Moh Khiew, 71. Gua Kerbau, 72. Gua Kepah, 73. Gua Kajang, 74. Gua Teluk Kelawar, 75. Gua Gunung Runtuh, 76. Gua Peraling, 77. Gua Cha, 78. Niah Cave, 79. Kimanis, 80. Liang Tebo, 81. Keboboh Cave, 82. Gua Tengkorak, 83. Leang Panninge, 84. Cappalombo1, 85. Gua Harimau, 86. Gua Pawon, 87. Gua Braholo, 88. Song Tritis, 89. Song Terus, 90. Song Keplek, 91. Gua Lawa, 92. Song Gentong, 93. Tron Bon Lei, 94. Ratu Mali 2, 95. Liang Lembudu (*suspected flexed) (see SI Appendix, Table S1 for details).
Our research allows us to test a hypothesis that many of our analyzed samples were subjected to long periods of smoke-drying and resulting mummification before burial, similar to ethnographic burial methods that were once widespread in Indigenous Australian societies and that are still practiced today in some regions of the New Guinea Highlands (13–15). To test our hypothesis, we recorded burial positions in the ground and visible burning and cutting marks on excavated bones. Selected samples have been subjected to X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), two laboratory methods used for examining internal bone microstructures. These methods allow detection of the heating of bones by using a low temperature smoking process that might not always have left surface traces of charring visible to the naked eye. Finally, we compare our findings with the ethnographic records of smoke-drying mummification in Australia and the New Guinea Highlands.
Hsiao-chun Hung, Zhenhua Deng, Yiheng Liu, Zhiyu Ran, Yue Zhang https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4290-6149, Zhen Li, Yousuke Kaifu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0483-104X, Qiang Huang, Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6966-1849, Hai Dang Le, Guangmao Xie, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Mariko Yamagata, Truman Simanjuntak, Sofwan Noerwidi, Mohammad Ruly Fauzi, Marlin Tolla, Alpius Wetipo, Gang He, Junmei Sawada, Chi Zhang, Peter Bellwood, and Hirofumi Matsumura
Earliest evidence of smoke-dried mummification: More than 10,000 years ago in southern China and Southeast Asia
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.,(2025) 122(38) e2515103122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515103122.
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by the National Academy of Science of the USA. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
In summary, the discovery of ritually smoke-dried mummified remains in southern China and Southeast Asia, dating back as far as 12,000 years ago, adds yet another layer of evidence that undermines Biblical literalism. These finds not only push back the origins of deliberate mummification well before those known from Egypt but also predate the supposed Biblical Flood and even the six-day creation narrative.
As the research team explains in their PNAS paper and the accompanying The Conversation article, the practice was widespread and deeply rooted in ritual, showing early humans engaged in complex spiritual and cultural behaviours long before the timelines assumed by creationists.
Far from supporting the notion of an inerrant Biblical history, discoveries like this highlight the richness, diversity, and antiquity of human culture—stories written in the ground itself, which cannot be reconciled with myths of a young Earth or a global flood.
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