How Long Have People Made Mummies?

For thousands of years, humans have used various methods to preserve their dead—by embalming, drying out or otherwise shielding bodies from decay. While the most famous examples come from ancient Egypt and South America, the origins of mummification may stretch back much earlier—to the Stone Age.

Analysis of remains found in graves across Southeast Asia, from China to Indonesia have shown that humans were practicing mummification as far back as 12,000 years ago. That makes these remains older than mummies from the Chinchorro culture in South America (about 7,000 years ago) and Egypt’s Old Kingdom (around 4,500 years ago). Unlike those better-known examples, the Southeast Asian mummies were preserved by being dried over smoky fires for periods lasting several months.

In a September 2025 study, Hsiao-chun Hung, a senior research fellow at Australian National University, and colleagues analyzed skeletons already known to science and realized that remains found in 54 ancient burials across 11 sites all showed previously unnoticed signs of mummification.

Many of the bodies had been buried in flexed or squatting postures that would have been difficult for a newly deceased corpse but possible if the body had been tightly bound after being smoke-dried using techniques similar to those used in the modern era by ethnic groups in the New Guinea highlands.

Even though no soft tissue remained in the burials, Hung reasoned that the bones themselves might contain evidence of how they had been prepared. Using X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy, the team confirmed that many of the burials had been exposed to extended periods of low heat, suggesting they had been preserved by smoking.

While the ancient Egyptians made mummies through an elaborate process that involved removing internal organs, drying the body with a salt mixture, coating the skin with oils and then wrapping it in layers of linen, the basis of mummification is simple—and linked to the environment.

“The general principle is that you have to stop the natural process of decay of a body,” says Albert Zink, an anthropologist who leads the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. “This very strongly depends on the environment.”

The environmental factor is why most examples of both naturally formed and man-made mummies come from very dry places like hot or cold deserts, or from caves or tombs with the right kind of airflow. Even Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old “ice man” discovered in an Italian glacier in 1991, was mummified as much by drying out as by freezing.

Zink says this requirement for dryness explains why there are relatively few known examples of mummification from humid tropical areas. Even if a body can be preserved for a while, as with modern smoke-dried examples, its soft tissues eventually decay in a moist environment. That’s why the bones of mummies might be mistaken for those of people who were buried more quickly after death.

Mummification traditions seem to develop in situations where people noticed natural processes and environments that slow decay, Zink notes. They then figure out how to augment these processes—for instance, by removing fast-putrefying internal organs, treating the body with salts or resins or wrapping it with special coverings. It took the ancient Egyptians thousands of years to perfect their embalming practices to the levels seen in the long-lasting mummies of Ramses II or Tutankhamun.

For Zink, the discovery that people have been refining mummification practices for longer and in more places than previously known is exciting. “It really pushes back the time where we can find mummies in different places all around the world,” he says.

Most mummification practices around the world are connected to a culture’s beliefs about the afterlife. “There’s a kind of dream,” Zink says, “that life does not stop with somebody dying.” Sometimes the body is preserved because it is believed the deceased will need it in the next life. In other cases, Zink notes, “it’s more of a social thing.”

Among the Inca in South America, mummified rulers held court alongside their living successors, maintained their possessions and were dressed and cared for by living descendants.

Similarly, the present-day Dani, Pumo and Anga (Kukukuku) peoples who live in the highland regions of Papua New Guinea use smoke to preserve the carefully bound bodies of cherished ancestors or leaders, who are then placed in special rooms of the house and brought out for celebrations or displayed on protected cliff ledges. In those cases, mummification allows communities to keep their ancestors present a while longer.

It’s possible that the ancient hunter-gatherers who bound up and smoked their dead 10,000 years ago, in roughly the same part of the world, were doing much the same thing. In fact, the researchers who analyzed the remains found genetic similarities between the ancient Southeast Asian mummy-makers and the modern Papua New Guinean and Indigenous Australian people. That suggests they likely descended from the early wave of Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers who migrated out of Africa and into tropical Asia.