Chinese science boosts Uigher claim to mummies

Its been known for some years that the 200 or so mummies rediscovered at the Tarim Basin have a distinctively Western appearance, and that they even sport red hair and blues eyes.

Its unsurprising that the embattled Uighurs have used the discovery to underpin the claim that the disputed region was always theirs.

But the incendiary new Chinese research  published in the journal BMC Biology seems to support that claim. It reveals that the people who lived and died theor were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. They also had an obsession with procreation.

This is the abstract from the Chinese publication:

Background
The Tarim Basin, located on the ancient Silk Road, played a very important role in the history of human migration and cultural communications between the West and the East. However, both the exact period at which the relevant events occurred and the origins of the people in the area remain very obscure. In this paper, we present data from the analyses of both Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) derived from human remains excavated from the Xiaohe cemetery, the oldest archeological site with human remains discovered in the Tarim Basin thus far.

Results
Mitochondrial DNA analysis showed that the Xiaohe people carried both the East Eurasian haplogroup (C) and the West Eurasian haplogroups (H and K), whereas Y chromosomal DNA analysis revealed only the West Eurasian haplogroup R1a1a in the male individuals.

Conclusion
Our results demonstrated that the Xiaohe people were an admixture from populations originating from both the West and the East, implying that the Tarim Basin had been occupied by an admixed population since the early Bronze Age. To our knowledge, this is the earliest genetic evidence of an admixed population settled in the Tarim Basin.

The team of scientists was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun with thirteen co-authors.

The bodies of all the men analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China.

AS Nicholas Wade reported:

The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.

For as long as recorded human history the Turkish-speaking Uighurs have lived around the Taklimakan Desert and inhospitable area that later travelers along the Silk Road gave a wide birth.
But the discovery in 1934 of frozen in time human remains, dating back 4000 years, at the Small River Cemetery by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman, gave a new boost to Uighur claims over the area of East Turkestan, or Xinjiang as its called by the Communists Party ruled China.
Forgotten for 66 years until it was rediscovered with GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition, the origin of the people of the Small River Cemetery has been hotly disputed.
But in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology, a Chinese scientist has stated that the 200 or so mummies discovered near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin occupied by the Taklimakan Deser, have a distinctively Western appearance.
The Uighurs have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. The people whose remains are being fought over were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China.

The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author. All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe.
Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago. .

The Tarim Basin is positioned at a critical site on the ancient Silk Road, has played a significant role in the history of human migration, cultural developments and communications between the East and the West. Its fame is due to the discovery of many well-preserved mummies within the area. These mummies, especially the prehistoric Bronze Age 'Caucasoid' mummies, such as the 'Beauty of Loulan', have attracted extensive interest among scientists regarding who were these people and where did they come from.

"Based on analyses of human remains and other archaeological materials from the ancient cemeteries (dated from approximately the Bronze Age to the Iron Age), there is now widespread acceptance that the first residents of the Tarim Basin came from the West. This was followed, in stages, by the arrival of Eastern people following the Han Dynasty. However, the exact time when the admixture of the East and the West occurred in this area is still obscure.
In 2000, the East Turkestan/Xinjiang Archaeological Institute rediscovered a very important Bronze Age site, the Xiaohe cemetery, by utilizing a device employing the global positioning system. The rediscovery of this cemetery provided an invaluable opportunity to further investigate the migrations of ancient populations in the region.

The Xiaohe cemetery (40°20'11"N, 88°40'20.3"E) is located in the Taklamakan Desert of northwest China, about 60 km south of the Peacock River and 175 km west of the ancient city of Kroraina.
It was first explored in 1934 by Folke Bergman, a Swedish archaeologist, but the cemetery was lost sight of until the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute rediscovered it in 2000. The burial site comprises a total of 167 graves.

Many enigmatic features of these graves, such as the pervasive use of sexual symbolism represented by tremendous numbers of huge phallus-posts and vulvae-posts, exaggerated wooden sculptures of human figures and masks, well-preserved boat coffins and mummies, a large number of textiles, ornaments and other artifacts, show that the civilization revealed at Xiaohe is different from any other archaeological site of the same period anywhere in the world.

The entire necropolis can be divided, based on the archeological materials, into earlier and later layers. Radiocarbon measurement (14C) dates the lowest layer of occupation to around 3980 ± 40 BP (personal communications; calibrated and measured by Wu Xiaohong, Head of the Laboratory of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Peking University), which is older than that of the Gumugou cemetery (dated to 3800). To date, these are the oldest human remains that have been excavated in the Tarim Basin [3]. A genetic study of these invaluable archeological materials will undoubtedly provide significant insights into the origins of the people of the Tarim Basin.

We examined the DNA profiles on both the maternal and the paternal aspects for all the morphologically well-preserved human remains from the lowest layer of the Xiaohe cemetery. We used these data to determine the population origins, to provide insights into the early human migration events in the Tarim Basin and, finally, to offer an expanded understanding of the human history of Eurasia.

Methods
Sampling
The excavation of the Xiaohe cemetery began in 2002. The lowest layer of the cemetery, comprising a total of 41 graves of which 37 have human skeletal remains, was excavated by the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute and the Research Center for Chinese Frontier Archaeology of Jilin University from 2004 to 2005. After the appropriate recording, the skeletal remains of 30 well-preserved individuals, together with sandy soil, were packed in cardboard boxes and sent to the ancient DNA laboratory of Jilin University, where they were stored in a dry and cool environment. All the samples were collected by two highly skilled scientists in our group, equipped with gloves and facemasks. As a result of the saline and alkaline character of the sand, the dry air and good drainage, the human remains are in excellent conditions. One intact femur and two tooth samples for each set of human remains were selected for DNA analysis.

The Xiaohe cemetery is the oldest archeological site with human remains discovered in the Tarim Basin to date. Our genetic analyses revealed that the maternal lineages of the Xiaohe people were originated from both the East and the West, whereas paternal lineages discovered in the Xiaohe people all originated from the West.

The East Eurasian lineage C, which was widely distributed in modern Asian populations, was the dominant haplogroup in the remains recovered from the lowest layer of the Xiaohe cemetery. This lineage is most frequently found in modern Siberian populations (Evenks, Yakut, Evens, Tuvinian, Buryat, Koryak and Chukchi) and to a lesser extent in modern East Asian (Mongolian, Daur and Korean) and Central Asian populations .

The New York Times tells us that the Chinese reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.

The Times picks up the story:

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria's Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath -- barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.

Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.

In the women's coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman's boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.

The men's boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women's boats. "The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism," Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the "obsession with procreation" reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.

Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. "It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about," he said.

Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists' interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was "a believable analysis." The buried people's evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.

Living in harsh surroundings, "infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great," Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. "Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered," Dr. Mair said.

Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe.

There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site.

The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.

The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the "centum" languages of Europe than to the "satem" languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).

The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is "a clear continuity of culture," Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.

An exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. -- the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia.

The comments on the New York Times are incendiary for Beijing:

This is a flavour: RS4 New York, NY March 15th, 2010 8:56 pm What a splendid article! I've twice been to Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan. There's so much fascinating history to witness there. But let's please not forget that the wonderful and friendly native Uighurs live in virtual serfdom, victims of Chinese population transfer and mass migration that threatens to destroy their native architecture, customs and culture. Recommend Recommended by 52 Readers 2. Fredegunde PA March 15th, 2010 8:56 pm The presence of string skirts (referred to as "girdles" in Classical Greek literature) is fascinating. I knew they were part and parcel of Bronze Age society in Europe, but I had no idea that they were to be found further East. The question I have is, Are string skirts a global phenomenon, or are they further evidence that these people came in from the West?

For anyone interested in ancient textiles and the cultures that produced them, I cannot recommend highly enough Elizabeth Wayland Barber's compulsively readable _Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years_.
Recommend Recommended by 32 Readers
3.
gg
sf

And of course a riposte from the Chinese Communit Party's Propaganda Ministry:
March 15th, 2010
8:56 pm
Dear NYT,

The Han settlers did not enter the Tarim Basin a mere 50 years ago; the entire Xinjiang (including the Tarim basin) came under the control of China's Han dynasty as early as 200 B.C. (And yes, the "Han" people of China got their name from the Han dynasty.) The Han dynasty's territory extended all the way to central Asia, and the famous Battle of Zhizhi, in which the Han empire annihilated a faction of the nomadic Xiongnu, was fought in what is today's Kazakhstan in 36 B.C. (Many historians believe the Xiongnu are the ancestors of the Huns who swept Europe centuries later and caused the downfall of the Roman Empire.)

Please start studying a little Chinese history and stop portraying or implying the Han Chinese as always the invaders in Uyghur land. (The Uyghurs did not arrive in Xinjiang until the 9th century A.D.).

This is contested history this links to a partial bibliography for those who wish to plunge in: