Talk:Tarim mummies

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Caucasian

It seems weird that this article is using the population classification preferred by phrenologists.

AlleyRegent69 (talk) 15:43, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

@AlleyRegent69: the problem is that it's not just phrenologists who use the term Caucasian, read the article, and we can only represent the sources. Doug Weller talk 08:24, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Caucasoid is a better term, used in plenty of the source material. It's also less ambiguous, since Caucasian often literally mean "from the Caucasus area".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:42, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

"The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies"

paper here "The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang, in the heart of Inner Asia, and the languages that they spoke have long been debated and remain contentious1. Here we present genomic data from 5 individuals dating to around 3000–2800 BC from the Dzungarian Basin and 13 individuals dating to around 2100–1700 BC from the Tarim Basin, representing the earliest yet discovered human remains from North and South Xinjiang, respectively. We find that the Early Bronze Age Dzungarian individuals exhibit a predominantly Afanasievo ancestry with an additional local contribution, and the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry. The Tarim individuals from the site of Xiaohe further exhibit strong evidence of milk proteins in their dental calculus, indicating a reliance on dairy pastoralism at the site since its founding. Our results do not support previous hypotheses for the origin of the Tarim mummies, who were argued to be Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists descended from the Afanasievo1,2 or to have originated among the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex3 or Inner Asian Mountain Corridor cultures4. Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, we find that the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert." Doug Weller talk 15:47, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

" The Tarim mummies’ so-called Western physical features are probably due to their connection to the Pleistocene ANE gene pool, and their extreme genetic isolation differs from the EBA Dzungarian, IAMC and Chemurchek populations, who experienced substantial genetic interactions with the nearby populations mirroring their cultural links, pointing towards a role of extreme environments as a barrier to human migration." Doug Weller talk 15:48, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

It remains unclear from that article whether and how each tested indivudual should in fact belong to the Tocharian speaker group - beside time and geography.HJJHolm (talk) 07:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Miscitation: "Li et al. (2010) found that nearly all – 11 out of 12 males, or around 92% – belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup R1a1-M17 (Z93-)[22], ..." Wrong: The term "M17" does not appear in Li(2010); instead "M198A", which marks R1a1a.HJJHolm (talk) 10:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

And F. Zhang et al.[including Ch Li], nature 599/2021, states, " ... our results support no hypothesis involving substantial human migration from steppe or mountain agropastoralists for the origin of the Bronze Age Tarim mummies, but rather we find that the Tarim mummies represent a culturally cosmopolitan but genetically isolated autochthonous population."

[And, the missing link:] "Future archaeological and palaeogenomic research on subsequent Tarim Basin populations—and most importantly, studies of the sites and periods where first millennium ad Tocharian texts have been recovered—are necessary to understand the later population history of the Tarim Basin."HJJHolm (talk) 09:57, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

in my view, the chinese sources remain self-contradicting regarding the origin of the 7 (!) R1a1a finds!HJJHolm (talk) 10:23, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Kumar et al. (2022)[1] to a certain degree fill the gap between the EBA population of Dzungaria with a high-level of Afanasievo ancestry reported in Zhang et al. (2021) and the late attestation of Tocharian in the northern rim of the Tarim Basim. Kumar et al. report high levels of Afanasievo ancestry in several individuals from the Tianshan mountains right to the north of the Tarim Basim dated to the LBA and IA, and also in individuals from the southern rim of the Tarim Basin from the Iron Age and even from the Historical Era (1727–1575 and 1866–1711 calBP!). This data has – to my knowledge – not yet been discussed in the context of linguistic archeology, but it confirms a proposal by Bjørn (2022)[2] about a two-step migration of Tocharian speakers which brought them to the Tarim Basin at a relatively late stage ("The language of Afanasievo suffered almost complete language extinction owing to both Iranic and Turkic encroachment, eclipsing most dialects before they had the chance to be documented; only Tocharian, by virtue of undertaking a second migration south into the Tarim Basin and the cultural sphere of Buddhist and Chinese written traditions, emerged before going extinct."). It is obviously not mandatory that the preservation of Tocharian necessarily went along with detectable persistence of Afanasievo ancestry (Tocharian could have also spread to the south through language shift), but finding traces of the latter certainly supports the Afanasievo/Tocharian hypothesis. –Austronesier (talk) 19:22, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Some more sources

• Wayland Barber, Elizabeth J. (1999). The Mummies of Ürümchi. London: Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-36897-4. – This source is already in the article but has barely been touched.
• Mair, Victcor H. (2010). "The mummies of east central Asia". Expedition. 52 (3). Philadelphia: Penn Museum: 23–32. – Ditto.
• Wilford, John Noble (7 May 1996). "Mummies, Textiles Offer Evidence of Europeans in Far East". The New York Times. – As with everything at NYT, you can defeat their paywall by doing a very quick select-all and copy before the paywall's overlay pops up, then paste the text into some other app and read it there.
• Killgrove, Kristina (18 July 2015). "DNA Reveals These Red-haired Chinese Mummies Come from Europe and Asia". Forbes.
• Frauenheim, Ed (December 1998). "Ancient Mystery – Jeannine Davis-kimball investigate the secret of central Asia's mummy people". The East Bay Monthly. Vol. 29, no. 3 – via Silk Road Foundation.
• "A meeting of civilisations: The mystery of China's Celtic mummies". The Independent. 28 August 2006. Archived from the original on 14 July 2007. – Lame title, but this is one of the pieces that gets into the modern politics, and our article needs to cover that better.
• "Caucasians preceded East Asians in basin". The Washington Times. 19 April 2005. – Ditto.
• Hadingham, Evan (31 May 1994). "The Mummies of Xinjiang". Discover. – A rather substantial article.
• Sheldon, Natasha (8 May 2013). "The Takla Makan Mummies: China's First Caucasian Immigrants". DecodedPast.com.
• Anthony, David W. (2001). "Tracking the Tarim Mummies: A Solution to the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins?". Archaeology. 54 (2): 76–84.
• Debaine-Francfort, Corinne; Abduressul, Idriss, eds. (2001). Keriya, mémoires d’un fleuve: Archéologie et civilisation des oasis du Taklamakan (in French). Suilly-la-Tour, France: Findakly.
• Mair, Victor H. (1995). "The Mummified Remains Found in the Tarim Basin: Special Issue". The Journal of Indo-European Studies. 23 (3–4).
• Mair, Victor H., ed. (1998). The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. "Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series". Vol. 26. Washington DC / Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man / University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications. 2 vols. – Expensive academic work (US$165 list price, and not found on Amazon, etc.), best gotten through inter-library loan.
• Mair, Victor H. (2005). "Genes, Geography, and Glottochronology: The Tarim Basin During Late Prehistory and History". In Jones-Bley, Karlene; Huld, Martin E.; Della Volpe, Angela; Robbins Dexter, Miriam (eds.). Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, November 5–6, 2004. "Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series". Vol. 50. Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man. pp. 1–46. – Ditto; about US$80 on Amazon right now.
• Mair, Victor H. (2006). "The Rediscovery and Complete Excavation of Ördek's Necropolis". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 34: 273–318.
• Millward, James A. (2006). Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York: Columbia University Press.

Can't particularly vouch for all source quality; I'm just running across mostly-secondary material and pasting the citation deets for it here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:01, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Caucasian typical traits? Is tallness exclusive only to whites?

I raise issues with the part where it states that the mummies had 'typical caucasian' feature and then states (tall stature, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes). I don't mean to state the obvious but should be mentioned many white people are not tall, nor is tallness a whites only trait. And also Eurasians, East Asians and Africans also can have deep set eyes so it's not exactly a trait belonging to Caucasians only. When you write that these are typical features of Caucasians, it's both inaccurate and wrong at multiple levels as other races have those too. However the mummies were described as having a so-called Western physical appearance. And such a facial style is actually typical of Caucasians and so that should stay. So made the changes. 49.180.125.162 (talk) 16:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)