New study claims that mummies found in China and Southeast Asia are world’s oldest

Smoke-dried mummies found in Southeast Asia and China are the world’s oldest, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The mummies were dried with smoke and left in crouching positions at burial sites across Southeast Asia and China, according to the study. The multinational team of researchers calculated their age as dating back as far as 12,000 years ago, making them thousands of years older than the mummies discovered in Chile.

The researchers looked at 54 burials from 11 sites across Southeast Asia and China. The techniques used to dry the mummies were “similar to that recorded ethnographically in some Australian and Highland New Guinea societies,” the authors said in the study’s abstract.

One author connected the mummies found in Asia to an ancient population of hunter-gatherers that predated the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of the region.

The mummies “belong to an original hunter-gatherer population that occupied Southeast Asia in Paleolithic times, and that continued in occupation in places like Australia and New Guinea through into current times,” study co-author Peter Bellwood, a professor emeritus in archaeology at Australian National University in Canberra, told NBC News.