These Are the World’s Oldest Mummies
Clip: Season 52 | 2m 49sVideo has Closed Captions
They're older than King Tut, Ötzi the Iceman, and even the ones found in the Atacama Desert.
Across southeastern Asia, researchers have identified dozens of mummies that are between 4,000 and 11,00 years old. After scanning the bones with invisible wavelengths of light, they found that almost all the bodies have been exposed to heat, preserved for millennia by smoke from a fire.
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These Are the World’s Oldest Mummies
Clip: Season 52 | 2m 49sVideo has Closed Captions
Across southeastern Asia, researchers have identified dozens of mummies that are between 4,000 and 11,00 years old. After scanning the bones with invisible wavelengths of light, they found that almost all the bodies have been exposed to heat, preserved for millennia by smoke from a fire.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- Scientists think they found the oldest mummies in the world.
They're older than King Tut, older than Otzi the Iceman, even older than those found in the Atacama Desert.
They may not look like those more familiar mummies, but scientists consider them mummies because somebody artificially preserved them after death, and they did that by smoking them.
Some of the newfound mummies are at least 11,000 years old, which means they might have been alive at the same time woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats roamed the earth.
Who were they, who made them, and how did they end up like this?
Across southeastern Asia, researchers have identified dozens of mummies.
Some were whole bodies and others only parts that are between four and 11,000 years old and possibly even older.
But how were they preserved?
Well, some of the mummies have visible char marks on them suggesting they were burned, but not all of them do.
So the researchers did two other kinds of analysis to check for invisible evidence of burning.
X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy.
Both involve scanning the bones with invisible wavelengths of light to see inside, kind of like an x-ray at the doctor.
Together, these tests can show whether the structure of a bone has been altered by exposure to heat, how hot that heat was, and which parts of the corpses got the worst of it.
And what the scientists found was that almost all of the bodies had been exposed to at least some heat, preserved for millennia by smoke from a fire.
This is what they think happened.
First, a corpse would be folded up and bound, curled in on itself in a way that a person can't really manage when they're alive.
Then it would be placed over a low temperature fire for an extended period.
This is called smoke drying, which preserves the body by removing the moisture and preventing it from decomposing.
It's basically the same concept people have used for millennia to preserve meat, you know, like smoked ham.
Once it's dry, it's a lot less appealing to all those bacteria that would normally go to town on it.
Next, the mummy would be moved into a significant location like a home or a special cave to be cherished before finally being buried.
What's significant is that this is actually super similar to more modern mummification practices in Australia and Papua, Indonesia.
In Papua, smoked mummies are still kept in some private homes.
And it's not a coincidence.
The ancestors of modern indigenous Papuans and Australians were very closely related to the southeastern Asian peoples of pre-neolithic times.
So it's possible that smoked mummification has actually been passed down directly from generation to generation for more than 10,000 years.
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