Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians turned their pharaohs into mummies, people in Southeast Asia and southern China were preserving bodies.
Mummification is the process of preserving a dead body. To keep it from decaying, the body would be dried and the internal organs would be removed.
The ancient Egyptians are famous for embalming bodies and wrapping them in linen cloth. They were so well-preserved that people mummified 4,000 years ago still have skin, hair and scars.
But they are not the world’s oldest mummies. New research suggests that people from southern China, Vietnam and Indonesia were mummifying bodies as early as 12,000 years ago. That makes them older than the Chinchorro mummies that were dried in the Chilean deserts around 7,000 years ago.
The researchers concluded that many of the bodies were “smoke-dried”. This means they were positioned near a fire to dry slowly. This process preserved the remains.
