| Mysterious Bronze Age Europoid Mummies in Western China | |
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 At the beginning of the 20th century, European explorers who traveled to Central Asia looking for antiquities reported finding fair-skinned and fair-haired mummies that were well-preserved in the very dry, salty Tarim Basin of western China. The Tarim Basin covers 150,000 square miles on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. That vast desert is crossed at its northern and southern edges by two branches of the ancient Silk Road trade route where travelers tried to avoid crossing the barren sand dunes. In the language spoken by the local Uighur people in Xinjiang region, Taklamakan means: “You come in and never come out.”
Two thousand years ago, the Roman writer and naturalist, Pliny the Elder, reported information from an embassy to Emperor Claudius that beyond the Himalayan mountains there were people who “exceeded the ordinary human height, had flaxen hair and blue eyes and made an uncouth sort of noise by way of talking.” One of the early 20th Century archaeologists was Sir Aurel Stein of Hungary who photographed some of the mummies in Cherchen that are now displayed in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China museums. Many of the mummies have been found in very good condition, owing to the dryness of the desert and the desiccation it produced in the corpses. The mummies share many typical Caucasoid body features with hair physically intact, ranging in color from blond to red to light brown and generally long, curly and braided.
Cherchen Man, Woman and Baby Cherchen / Qiemo is a river oasis town along the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. It is the largest town east of Hotan in the southern Xinjiang region. Cherchen has a truly ancient human history, based on the 3,500-year-old cemetery along the ancient Jade Road that traded with the earliest Chinese dynasties and the similarly-dated Bronze Age rock carvings south of town along another ancient trade route to what is now Tibet and a back door to central China.
One of the most notable mummies called “Cherchen Man” is about 6-feet-tall with reddish hair and was about 50-years-old when he died in 1,000 B. C. (3,000-years-ago). He was found at Zaghunluq near Cherchen buried in a red twill tunic and tartan leggings with soft deerskin boots above his knees. Cherchen Man had ten different hats. One looked like a beret, one like a horned cap, and one like a Phrygian cap. Analysis has shown that the weave of the tunic is the same as that found on the bodies of salt miners in Austria from 1,300 B.C.
Cherchen Man was found in one tomb with the mummies of three women and a baby. One of the women who shared the tomb was tall and had light blondish-brown, braided hair. Her face is also painted with yellow curling designs and she had red yarn earrings like Cherchen Man.
The baby was wrapped in a beautiful red-brown cloth tied with a red and blue cord. Underneath the baby's red and blue felt hat were tufts of blond hair. A blue stone was placed on each eye and a tuft of orange wool was put into each nostril. Beside it was a small cow's horn and a baby's milk bottle made from the teat of a sheep's udder, implying that perhaps the baby's mother died in birth or soon after requiring the baby to be hand-fed before it, too, died. Reinforcing the speculation that this was a family, the weaving of the man’s clothing and the baby’s blanket are identical and even the blue yarn for the baby's cap is the same as yarn used for the man’s leggings. The burial sites of the Cherchen family and others were marked with mounds and in some cases circles of standing stones.
Found with Mummies
Interview: Victor H. Mair, Ph.D., Prof. of Chinese Language and Literature, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: “The first time I saw the mummies was back in 1988 when I was leading a tour with the Smithsonian Institution. I had been to the Xinjiang Wieger Autonomous Region Museum in western China many times before. But that time, they had a new exhibition hall. It was behind some curtains. It was very dark. When I went through with my group, there was a whole room full of mummies that had not been there before and I was stunned because I was not expecting them and also because these mummies were all Europoid, looking like Europeans. They were Caucasoid. They also had very wonderful textiles they were wearing and hats and all kinds of tools that made me think they were a lot more advanced for the years they were saying. They (museum) said these mummies were Bronze Age, 3,000 to nearly 4,000 years ago. And I thought, ‘This can’t be!’ They have all of this wonderful technology and they are so well-preserved. At first, I thought it was some kind of a hoax, like Madame Tussauds museum or that the Chinese museum was doing this to drum up tourist business. But then, I told my Smithsonian charges, ‘You go back to the hotel. I’m staying here.’ And I stayed in that room for three or four hours and looked at all the mummies there and filed it away in the back of my head because I was not an archaeologist at that time. PROF. MAIR, YOU WERE LOOKING AT RED HAIR AND RED BEARDS, CORRECT? Well, a lot of people say the hair is red and red beards. Some of them have reddish hair. Some have reddish beards. Some have blond hair, blond beards, brownish hair, brownish beards. So, there is a range of tinges to their hair. But they generally tend to be light in color – not black hair like people from East Asia. Are Mummies Celtic? THEY ARE REFERRED TO AS CELTIC MUMMIES BECAUSE OF LATER DNA TESTS? Oh, no, I do not agree with calling them Celtic mummies. Maybe they are. Maybe they have some remote connection to Celtic peoples, but that has not been established yet. There is a lot of work that has to be done before determining who they are related to, what languages they may have spoken. One of the reasons people say, ‘They might be Celts is that some of the mummies do have plaids and that makes people get very excited because they are definitely tartans or plaids. And putting that together with the fact that some of the mummies do have reddish hair and reddish beards. But I think more of them have blondish or light brown, so they are by no means all reddish. But, then people jump to the conclusion that they were Celtic.
Yingpan Man
HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT IS DESCRIBED AS THE BEST PRESERVED OF ALL THE CORPSES KNOWN AS YINGPAN MAN, A 2,000-YEAR-OLD CAUCASIAN DISCOVERED IN 1995 WHO HAD A GOLD FOIL DEATH MASK? Well, this gentleman will be in the exhibition at the Bowers Museum, so you’ll get to see him yourself. [Bowers Museum, 2002 North Main Street, Santa Ana, California 92706, “Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China,” from March 27 to July 25, 2010.] Yes, this is the Yingpan Man. I have seen him with my own eyes many times. What is so important about Yingpan Man – and he’s not quite 2,000 years old. We think now he’s probably about 1,500-years-old (420 A. D.). So, he’s one of the later Caucasoid mummies. I know what’s behind the mask, but normally when he’s exhibited, you don’t get to see his face. You just see his mask with the gold foil on his forehead and the amazingly resplendent clothing that he’s wearing. WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN BEHIND THE MASK? (laughs) The man behind the mask – yeah! Well, he did have light brown hair and he is very tall. SIX FOOT SIX INCHES, RIGHT? Yes, six foot six inches, the tallest of the mummies. AND HE HAD A BLOND BEARD? Well, light brown. Actually the remains were not well-preserved. So when he is displayed in public, it’s always with the mask on and with the clothing, so that is what you are seeing – the very elaborate set of clothing. THAT GOLD FOIL DEATH MASK, THAT’S IN THE GREEK TRADITION, ISN’T IT? There are a number of traditions that have death masks all across Eurasia, especially in the northern part and across the Steppes. So, I wouldn’t attribute this necessarily to Greek influence. But there are definitely Greco-Roman motifs on his clothing. BEHIND THE GOLD FOILED MASK, IS HIS FACE RECOGNIZABLE IN TERMS OF EYES AND NOSE? No. I can say that categorically, not now (laughs) it is not. I myself when I first saw him many times, I would conjecture, ‘What did he look like? What’s behind there?’ But I can tell you now that it’s not really – the state of preservation is not such that he’s well recognizable. IT’S ESTIMATED THAT YINGPAN MAN WAS ABOUT 30-YEARS-OLD WHEN HE DIED? Yes, 30 to 35. It’s quite wonderful that we will be able to see him in America. DO YOU HAVE ANY FORENSIC EVIDENCE ABOUT HOW YINGPAN MAN DID DIE? No, not for him. His physical remains have not been studied by physical anthropologists. SO WE DON’T HAVE DNA ANALYSIS FROM HIM? No, but we do have for some other mummies.
DNA Results from Cemetery # 5, Xiaohe: A paper that I was a co-author on has not come out yet (expected in mid-March 2010), but I was the co-author with the top geneticist in China and a leading archaeologist and the paper will come out in a few days. But it’s probably the most important article written about the genetics of Central Asia of this region. So, it’s a real breakthrough and done by two labs in China. This latest study in which I was involved shows that the mummies from a site called Xiaohe. That means "Small River" and it is pronounced like SHE-OW-huh. It is Cemetery # 5, a site that dates to 1,800 B. C., or slightly earlier. ALMOST 4,000 YEARS AGO. Almost 4,000 years ago, yes. One of the mummies from that burial ground is called the Beauty of Xiaohe. And she, too, will be in the Bowers Museum exhibition. She is really stunning!
Studies have been done on the physical remains of mummies from the Xiaohe site and these are the best quality-controlled studies and they have shown that the Y chromosome haplotypes are exclusively European. So, the male haplotypes are European. The quality of the research is such that they can indicate a western European kind of haplotype. So, this is very exciting! But at the same time, this new article (upcoming genetics journal March 2010) shows that there is an admixture with East Asian, meaning eastern Eurasian. It seems to indicate that the mitochondrial DNA – that’s the mother’s DNA, female DNA – with people from south Siberia. So, it seems like people were coming across the Steppes, and mainly men, and forming families with local women. So this research will come out probably within the next two to three weeks in March 2010. And it’s very, very exciting!
Tarim Basin, Western China IS IT TRUE THAT THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 400 MUMMIES DISCOVERED? In the whole Tarim Basin, which is what we are talking about, there are many sites where there are human remains found and those remains date from the early Bronze Age down to the Medieval Period. Before about the time of Christ, down to the 4th or 5th Century of our era, there are Europoid mummies at many sites around the Tarim Basin. Most of the sites are on the southern rim and the eastern rim of the Tarim Basin. When I say Tarim Basin, I’m talking about that place where the Taklamakan Desert is, one of the biggest deserts in the world and it’s also very dry and a lot of salty land there. So, the dryness and saltiness is what has preserved the mummies so well, plus the fact that in winter, it is very, very cold. So you could say that the people who died in the winter, they end up being freeze dried. IS IT TRUE THAT IN THE TARIM BASIN, THERE ARE DOLMENS AND STONES MARKING IN CIRCLES AROUND WHERE THE MUMMIES HAVE BEEN FOUND? There are a variety of different burial types. In the northern area up in the mountains in the high pastures, there are quite large mounds made of stone and earth. In the southern part of the region, there are a variety of tombs, some marked with small piles of stones. There is one site that has hundreds of wooden posts in like a solar array around the tombs.
So, there is not just a single type. But some of them do have small mounds of stones marking them on the surface. WHICH IS AGAIN SIMILAR TO WESTERN EUROPE. Yes, but this kind of marking of graves is also very common in Central Asia. IS THERE ANY REASON WHY THE TARIM BASIN WOULD HAVE BEEN USED AS A BURIAL GROUND? That’s a good question. How? Why? did the people end up there? But this area was not just a burial ground. It was where they were living, too. It’s a very harsh environment, very harsh climate. So, people did not live there before about 4,000 years ago. The earliest inhabitants that we can determine for certain entered the Tarim Basin about 4,000 years ago.”
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