Archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin thousands of years before East Asian people arrived.
Hitler believed that persons with a height of 6 feet 6 inches or more were the closest genetic cousins of the original proto-Aryan tribes that originated in central Asia and that the Caucasian people and civilizations are supposed to have descended from these tribes.
The Discovery of hundreds of ancient mummies in Asia has forced a re-examination of old Chinese literature. These books depict ancient Chinese people as having enormous height, bright blue eyes, long noses, big beards, and either red or blonde hair.
The discoveries of the giant 4,000-year-old “Beauty of Loulan” and (six-foot, six-inch) “Charchan Man” support the legends about these mythical ancient Aryans.
After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists used DNA testing to demonstrate that Caucasians inhabited China’s Tarim Basin thousands of years before East Asian people arrived, ending years of debate and political intrigue.
The study, which the Chinese government appears to have delayed making public due to fears about fanning Uighur Muslim separatism in its westernmost Xinjiang province, is based on a hoard of ancient dried-out bodies discovered in recent decades near the Tarim Basin.
According to Victor H. Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of “The Tarim Mummies“, this is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it has created a lot of difficulties. He believes that it would be better for everyone to approach this from a purely scientific and historical perspective.
The undisturbed 4,000-year-old “Beauty of Loulan” and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the “Charchan Man” discovered in the 1980s are legendary in international archaeological circles for the remarkable condition of preservation and the quantity of knowledge they provide to modern research.
The finds along the ancient Silk Road were compared to the discovery of Egyptian mummies in historical and scientific circles. However, China’s worry for its authority in restive Xinjiang is widely regarded as preventing greater research and wider public disclosure of the findings.
The ancient corpses, which avoided natural decomposition due to the Tarim Basin’s dry atmosphere and alkaline soils, have not only provided scientists with insight into their physical biologies, but their clothes, tools, and burial rituals have provided historians with a glimpse into life in the Bronze Age.
Researchers who were successful in bringing the results to Western researchers in the 1990s worked extensively to get Chinese authorization to transfer samples out of China for conclusive DNA testing.
One recent mission succeeded in gathering 52 samples with the assistance of Chinese researchers, but Mair’s hosts then changed their minds and only allowed five of them to leave the country.
“I spent six months in Sweden last year doing nothing but genetic research,” Mair said in 2010, from his home in the US where he still teaches Chinese 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 Orkhon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern-day Mongolia, around the year 842.” He added that, “Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, and the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story.”
It took a few years for China to allow genetic research; and a 2004 study conducted by Jilin University discovering that the mummies’ DNA included Europoid genes, showing that the early settlers of Western China were not East Asians.
Later, in 2007 and 2009, scientists from China’s Jilin University and Fudan University both tested the Loulan Beauty’s DNA. They found she was at least part European, but her people might have lived in Siberia before migrating to Xinjiang. But they all found that the Loulan Beauty was not an Uighur woman, which meant there was less reason for people to argue about her.
