Scientists say they’ve found the world’s oldest mummies, and they’re far from Egypt

Mummies are most often associated with Egypt, where the oldest are around 4,500 years old. But the researchers say they found much older mummies on the other side of the world.

“We found that in southern China and Southeast Asia, there were many archaeological sites that contain human burials between four and 14,000 years old,” Professor Peter Bellwood, study co-author, NBC News on Tuesday during a telephone interview.

The study, which was published on Monday in the Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined 54 pre-Neolithic burials of 11 archaeological sites in southern China and Southeast Asia, with a large number of samples from Vietnam and the autonomous region of Guangxi-Zhuang in China, and a smaller number from Laos, Laos, Laos, Laos Malaysia and Indonesia.

Human remains have been found in closely crouched or crouched postures, often with traces of burning. The researchers said that the results confirmed that many remains had been dried for smoke on fire for long periods before burial in a mummification process.

The remains “belong to an original hunter population who occupied Southeast Asia at the Paleolithic era, and which continued in places like Australia and New Guinea to the current era,” said Bellwood, emeritus professor of archeology at the school of archeology and anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Previously, the oldest known mummies had been found not in Egypt but in Peru and Modern Chile, where they were prepared by a fisherman called the chinchorro about 7,000 years ago.

A leading expert from ancient Egypt was also impressed by the results.

“The term has been taken by other groups to identify other preserved organizations. It therefore has a much more general understanding,” said Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo who was not involved in research, in an interview.

“What is good is that the idea behind it is similar because they wanted to preserve the body,” she added.

The project began in 2017 with an occasional conversation between two of its main authors, then expanded to include 24 experts.

“We have gradually gathered several evidence in many years,” said Dr. Hsiao-Chun, a main study by the study, in an email. “It’s a bit like detective work – find small clues, reconstruct them and get more and more confident in the event.”