Tue Apr 19, 9:42 AM ET

URUMQI, China (AFP) - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China's Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived.

AFP Photo

The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades.

"It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it has created a lot of difficulties," Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of "Mummies of the Tarim Basin", told AFP.

"It would be better for everyone to approach this from a purely scientific and historical perspective."

The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old "Beauty of Loulan" and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the "Charchan Man" are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research.

In historic and scientific circles the discoveries along the ancient Silk Road were on a par with finding the Egyptian mummies.

But China's concern over its rule in restive Xinjiang has widely been perceived as impeding faster research into them and greater publicity of the findings.

The desiccated corpses, which avoided natural decomposition due to the dry atmosphere and alkaline soils in the Tarim Basin, have not only given scientists a look into their physical biologies, but their clothes, tools and burial rituals have given historians a glimpse into life in the Bronze Age.

Mair, who played a pivotal role in bringing the discoveries to Western scholars in the 1990s, has worked tirelessly to get Chinese approval to take samples out of China for definitive genetic testing.

One expedition in recent years succeeded in collecting 52 samples with the aide of Chinese researchers, but later Mair's hosts had a change of heart and only let five of them out of the country.

"I spent six months in Sweden last year doing nothing but genetic research," Mair said from his home in the United States where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

"My research has shown that in the second millennium BC, the oldest mummies, like the Loulan Beauty, were the earliest settlers in the Tarim Basin.

"From the evidence available, we have found that during the first 1,000 years after the Loulan Beauty, the only settlers in the Tarim Basin were Caucasoid."

East Asian peoples only began showing up in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin about 3,000 years ago, Mair said, while the Uighur peoples arrived after the collapse of the Orkon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern day Mongolia, around the year 842.

"Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story," he said.

Mair hopes to publish his new findings in the coming months.

China has only allowed the genetic studies in the last few years, with a 2004 study carried out by Jilin University also finding that the mummies' DNA had Europoid genes, further proving that the earliest settlers of Western China were not East Asians.

In the preface to the 2002 book, "Ancient Corpses of Xinjiang," written by Chinese archeologist Wang Huabing, the Chinese historian and Sanskrit specialist Ji Xianlin soundly denounced the use of the mummies by Uighur separatists as proof that Xinjiang should not belong to China.

"What has stirred up the most excitement in academic circles, both in the East and the West, is the fact that the ancient corpses of 'white (Caucasoid/Europid) people' have been excavated," Jin wrote.

"However, within China a small group of ethnic separatists have taken advantage of this opportunity to stir up trouble and are acting like buffoons, (styling) themselves the descendants of these ancient 'white people' with the aim of dividing the motherland."

Further on, in an apparent swipe at the government's lack of eagerness to acknowledge the science and publicize it to the world, Ji wrote that "a scientist may not distort facts for political reasons, religious reasons, or any other reason".

Meanwhile, Yingpan Man, a nearly perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old Caucasoid mummy, was only this month allowed to leave China for the first time, and is being displayed at the Tokyo Edo Museum.

The Yingpan Man, discovered in 1995 in the region that bears his name, has been seen as the best preserved of all the undisturbed mummies that have so far been found.

Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.

His nearly 2.00 meter (six-foot, six-inch) long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region.

When the Yingpan Man returns from Tokyo to Urumqi where he has long been kept out of public eye, he is expected to be finally put on display when the new Xinjiang Museum opens this year.

China has hundreds of the mummies in various degrees of dessication and decomposition, including the prominent Han Chinese warrior Zhang Xiong and other Uighur mummies.

The usual questions:

1) what are "mixed Caucasian and East Asian" traits mean?

2)Are such traits explainable only as a result of hybridisation or are they also explainable as an instance of clinal variation along a continuum?

Example: people in Africa who are of relative intermediate height who live in the areas between taller and shorter peoples are not to be seen automatically as hybrids of the taller and shorter people but as being the adaptive product of their specific environments.

The point is a logical one: if as some argue that there are specific phenotypical and genotypical "racial" population groups all emanating from a single branch then there must be/have been transtitional traits.

The naive tendency on the part of researchers though is to see traits that seem intermediate between others as the result of the hybridisation of ideal "pure types". That kind of s thinking is of course absurd. Empirical proof, empirical proof is what genuine science must be based on.

The Tarim Basin controversy, it seems, is somewhat like that about Kennewick Man in the U.S.

While the first glimpse of the term 'caucasians' rang a bell at beginning of the article, that is, in terms of the usual diffusionist tendency of Euro-researchers to find 'caucasians' in any human group, it became apparent that the authors intended to go much further than such diffusionism:

quote:

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Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.

His nearly 2.00 meter (six-foot, six-inch) long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region.

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Just as modern western Europeans like to put a claim on ancient Greece as being 'western', despite all contradictions to history, in an effort to connect those folks to the pale-looking people of western Europe, so are the authors here, trying to find a connection to ancient Greek and hence, possibly create another artificial knot to tie western Europeans to this potentially complex culture found in the Chinese region. In fact, the authors here, as indicative of their mentioning of 'western European-like' garments, are trying to say outright that these may be the same people, who went onto western Europe.

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Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.

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quote:

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His nearly 2.00 meter (six-foot, six-inch) long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region.

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
[QUOTE]
LOL... This is what gets those white-supremacist idiots like Akobago, all excited. It's clear that this so-called expert is biased when using such terms as a highest level "Caucasoid civilization" in his description, especially on such a culture as these Tarim Basin people. Not to put down these ancient people and their culture. I do find their culture to be fascinating, but come on!! Their culture was not as sophisticated and wonderful as some of these 'scholars' are trying to make. These Tarim Basin people are just another group of Indo-European nomads of the western steppes. They settled the Tarim Basin, and?...

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Anybody who has met some Xinjiang people would not be surprised at all by this discovery. However the article does duel into vagary; for example, what does it mean by "tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization"? On the other hand it brought to mind the idea of DNA testing for ancient Egyptian mummies. Surely if a Chinese university was able to carry out testing on a 4000-year old mummy, what makes it so hard to do the same on some of the AE ones? As far as I am aware there hasn't been any DNA study on AE mummies.

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Originally posted by YuhiVII:

As far as I am aware there hasn't been any DNA study on AE mummies.

[This message has been edited by YuhiVII (edited 23 April 2005).]

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Thought Posts:

http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/Forum8/HTML/001100.html

quote:

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Originally posted by YuhiVII:
On the other hand it brought to mind the idea of DNA testing for ancient Egyptian mummies. Surely if a Chinese university was able to carry out testing on a 4000-year old mummy, what makes it so hard to do the same on some of the AE ones?

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This is an excerpt from an article that Ausar posted earlier, about the possible problems of the authentication of DNA information from ancient remains:

Marota I, Basile C, Ubaldi M, Rollo F.

The writing sheets made with strips from the stem (caulis) of papyri (Cyperus papyrus) are one of the most ingenious products of ancient technology.

We extracted DNA from samples of modern papyri varying in age from 0-100 years BP and from ancient specimens from Egypt, with an age-span from 1,300-3,200 years BP. The copy number of the plant chloroplast DNA in the sheets was determined using a competitive PCR system designed on the basis of a short (90 bp) tract of the chloroplast's ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase large subunit (rbcL) gene sequence.

The results allowed us to establish that the DNA half-life in papyri is about 19-24 years.

This means that the last DNA fragments will vanish within no more than 532-672 years from the sheets being manufactured. In a parallel investigation, we checked the archaeological specimens for the presence of residual DNA and determined the extent of
racemization of aspartic (Asp) acid in both modern and ancient specimens, as a previous report (Poinar et al. [1996], Science 272:864-866) showed that racemization of aspartic acid and DNA decay are linked.

The results
confirmed the complete loss of authentic DNA, even in the less ancient (8th century AD) papyri. On the other hand, when the regression for Asp racemization rates in papyri was compared with that for human and animal remains from Egyptian archaeological sites, it proved, quite surprisingly, that the regressions are virtually identical. Our study provides an indirect argument against the reliability of claims about the recovery of authentic DNA from Egyptian mummies and bone remains.

Copyright 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/Forum8/HTML/001670.html

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While it may be hard to directly get good DNA information from ancient remains, it doesn't mean that there aren't effective means of extracting anthropological information, that shed light on physical affinities. For instance, hair texture can be determined from microscopic analysis of a hair fragment.

Studies on genetically transmitted disorder; this from 1999:

Use of the amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS) in the study of HbS in predynastic Egyptian remains.

Marin A, Cerutti N, Massa ER.

Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e dell'Uomo, Universita degli Studi di Torino.

We conducted a molecular investigation of the presence of sicklemia in six predynastic Egyptian mummies (about 3200 BC) from the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum of Turin. Previous studies of these remains showed the presence of severe anemia, while histological preparations of mummified tissues revealed hemolytic disorders. DNA was extracted from dental samples with a silica-gel method specific for ancient DNA. A modification of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), called amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS) was then applied. ARMS is based on specific priming of the PCR and it permits diagnosis of single nucleotide mutations. In this method, amplification can occur only in the presence of the specific mutation being studied. The amplified DNA was analyzed by electrophoresis. In samples of three individuals, there was a band at the level of the HbS mutated fragment, indicating that they were affected by sicklemia. On the basis of our results, we discuss the possible uses of new molecular investigation systems in paleopathological diagnoses of genetic diseases and viral, bacterial and fungal infections.

Boll Soc Ital Biol Sper. 1999 May-Jun;75(5-6):27-30

The "caucasoid" appearance of the Xinqiang mummies remembers me the lingüistic polemics with the Tocarian: in a remote oasis of Central Asia, more o less inside the area of influence of sinoid (aka mongoloid, aka far-eastern asians) appeared a group of texts that happened to be close to sanskrit and are considered now (if I'm not very wrong) the eastern limit of Indo-european languages.

Mmm... I remember a very old text of physical anthropology saying that, at the start, there were "caucasoid in the steppes, mongoloids in the woods". And it is true that europeans' limb proportions are closer to the open-land Nilotic (beware: statistics) than to forest-dwelling peoples.

And now I think, some cultural traits of Europe, as all the cattle-herding complex (language, arqueology, lactose-tolerance rates, economic importance even today, etc.), tells us a story that fits more with the open lands of the Eastern Europe's steppe that to the closed forests of W Europe
...Reasonable, if we add that there were no forest in the Western European Plains in the late Ice Age: it was a cold steppe all over, from today's Russia to the French Atlantic coast.

Someone for the ecologic theory in the development of current "races" (aka main human ecotipes)?
Maybe these guys Xinqians have a case for autonomy after all!