The American historian Victor mair He often says that when he first saw the mummies of the Xiaohe culture in 1988, he thought that it was a scam for the tourists. The corpses, found in what is now the Taklamakan Desert in western China, were about 4,000 years old, but were astonishingly well preserved, with brightly colored clothing and sophisticated ornaments. They almost looked like living people. “The most surprising thing is that practically all of them are Caucasian. Where did they come from and how did they end up in the heart of Asia? ”, Mair wondered by then. The historian proposed a theory: that colorful civilization of the Bronze Age could not arise in that inhospitable corner. Its first members had to be Indo-European language migrants, arrived on horseback from remote parts of Eurasia. An international scientific team now maintains that it has solved the enigma: the surprising members of the Xiaohe culture, they say, did not come from distant mountains: it was an indigenous population, without great mixtures for more than 9,000 years.
The Tarim River basin is located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a stretch of the Silk Road that fits the topic of the crossroads of cultures. Hundreds of naturally mummified people have appeared there in recent decades, thanks to the arid and cold climate, and often buried in mysterious wooden ship-shaped coffins. The anthropologist Christina Warinner describes one of the most fascinating features of the Tarim mummies: their supposed western appearance. “They were tall people, with brown hair, sometimes light, and some men had dense beards”, explains the researcher, from Harvard University (USA). Some individuals were even buried with long-nosed masks. One of the best known mummies, the so-called Xiaohe’s Bella, He presented a showy clothing of felt and sheep’s wool, in addition to a majestic white hat.
The origin of these mummies has always been controversial, with three major hypotheses on the table. One of them argues that the sophisticated Xiaohe culture comes from migrant herders from southern Siberia, in turn linked to the Yamnaya, the nomads who left the steppes and whose descendants ended up replacing almost all the humans of the Iberian Peninsula for 4,500 years. . The other two theories argue that they were farmers from the mountains of Central Asia or the oases of present-day Afghanistan.
Christina Warinner’s team believes that none of the three hypotheses is correct. Scientists have now analyzed the DNA of 13 mummies from the Tarim and their results suggest that it was an indigenous population, without major mixtures for more than 9,000 years. However, despite this marked genetic isolation, the group was “culturally cosmopolitan.” Its members grew wheat, barley and millet, three plants domesticated in the Middle East or northern China. They also made cheese using a fermentation similar to kefir, a technique perhaps learned from the descendants of Siberian shepherds. And they buried their dead with sprigs of ephedra, a plant considered medicinal in the oases of Central Asia.
“We were struck by the striking contrast between their genetic isolation and their cultural connections,” admits Warinner. “It is not clear how or why they maintained such strict genetic isolation, but their openness to the adoption of new technologies is what probably made them successful in colonizing the desert oases of the Tarim basin,” adds the anthropologist. , who is leading the investigation along with colleagues from China, Germany and South Korea.
The study, published this Wednesday in the magazine Nature, shakes the exotic hypotheses defended for decades. Historian Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and one of the leading experts on these mummies, declines to comment on the new research. “I think it is basically defective,” he has limited himself to affirming to this newspaper.
Mair published a reference book two decades ago, The mummies of the Tarim (Thames & Hudson publisher). The co-author of that volume, the archaeologist James mallory, he does believe that the new study is “extremely interesting and valuable, although its results are not so surprising.” Mallory of Queen’s University of Belfast (UK) believes that genetic analysis ignores a fourth “chronologically more probable” hypothesis: that the Okunevo – another of the cultures of the Eurasian steppes during the Bronze Age – were the ancestors of the desiccated people in the Tarim basin.
Mallory himself already studied in 2015 the parallels between these two societies, overlapped in time some 4,000 years ago. “If they had compared the DNA with that of the Okunevo, it would be a much more robust study,” argues the expert. The archaeologist Paula Doumani Dupuy, from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan), has a different opinion in a parallel article in the magazine Nature. In his view, the new analysis “has already answered the question of the genetic origins of the Xiaohe culture.”
The search for the roots of the mummies has been flammable from the beginning. Many Uighurs – the Turkmen-speaking and ethnic Muslim minority living in the region today – want independence from China and they hugged right away to the unique mummies of the Tarim, whose 4,000-year-old would supposedly give them priority over the Han ethnic group, the majority of the country, who arrived some two millennia later. In fact, he argued five years ago Victor Mair himself, the Uyghurs arrived in the Tarim Basin even a millennium later than the Han. The historian also claimed that the members of the Xiaohe culture were “A peaceful and egalitarian people”, with hardly any weapons or great differences in status in their graves. What seems clear is that their colorful mummies have nothing to contribute to the wars of the 21st century.
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