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Language: en
Scientists think they found [music] the
oldest mummies in the world. They're
older than King Tut, older than Usie the
Iceman, even older than those found in
the Atakama Desert. They might not look
like those more familiar mummies, but
scientists consider them [music] mummies
because somebody artificially preserved
them after death. And they did that by
smoking them. Some of the newfound
mummies are at least [music] 11,000
years old, which means they might have
been alive at the same time woolly
mammoths and saber-tooth cats roam the
earth. Who were they? Who made them?
[music] 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 4 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 defraction and forier
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, [music] 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 [music] 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 [music] 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 [music] it's not
a coincidence. The ancestors of modern
indigenous Papawans 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 [music] from generation to
generation for more than 10,000 years.
[music]
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