54 replies to this topic

[DaMo]

http://www.washingto...01056-2135r.htm

Caucasians preceded East Asians in basin

By Robert J. Saiget
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

URUMQI, China -- After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proved that Caucasians roamed China's Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived.
    The research finding -- which the Beijing government apparently delayed releasing, fearing it could fuel Uighur Muslim separatism in China's 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.

The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old "Beauty of Loulan" and the 3,000-year-old body of the "Charchan Man" are legendary in international 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 the separatists in Xinjiang have embraced the Caucasoid mummies as evidence that the Uighurs do not belong in China, forcing Beijing to slow the research.
    "It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized, because it has created a lot of difficulties," said Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of "The Tarim Mummies."
    The desiccated corpses, which avoided natural decomposition because of the dry atmosphere and alkaline soils in the Tarim Basin, have given historians a glimpse of life in the Bronze Age.
    Mr. Mair, a University of Pennsylvania professor who played a pivotal role in bringing the discoveries to Western scholars in the 1990s, has struggled to take samples out of China for genetic testing. One recent expedition was allowed to take five samples out.
    "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," Mr. Mair said.
    East Asian peoples began showing up in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin only about 3,000 years ago, he said, while the Uighurs arrived after the collapse of the Orkhon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern-day Mongolia, about the year 842.
    A study last year by Jilin University also found that the mummies' DNA had Europoid genes.
    Meanwhile, Yingpan Man, a nearly perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old Caucasoid mummy, was allowed this month to leave China for the first time, and is being displayed at the Edo-Tokyo Museum.
    The Yingpan Man, discovered in 1995 in the region that bears his name, has a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blond bearded face, and wears elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.
    His nearly 6-foot-6 body is the tallest of all the mummies found, 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 Xinjiang Museum opens this year.

[Kenneth]

It is a shame politics gets involved. The Caucasian mummies are well know, their identity as Caucasian has been known for a long time, and their European style textiles and their burial practices are quite distinct.
THe carbon dating of the mummies in Xinjiang puts the earliest at around SHang dynasty period and the last at Eastern ZHou period, by which time Asians were being mummified alongside them, and the communities had apparently merged.
It is a shame people cant learn from this as there hasnt been any suggestion of hostility during the time the mummies date from, as they didnt have governments or seperatist movements to complicate life.
The caucasian population probably only faded out as new caucasian populations no longer made the difficult journey to the region from the far 'West' and they mingled with the later arriving Asian folk and became part of the mix of the region .

[DaMo]

It's worse when not just politics but blatant racial supremacism gets involved. The master-racers are presently making hay with this story, trying to convince their audiences that these finds somehow "vindicate" their claims about the ancient Caucasoid presence in Chinese territory. These claims, however, run far beyond the simple fact that Caucasoids settled the Tarim Basin, and into insisting that they brought agriculture, clothing, animal domestication, technology, writing and pretty much civilization itself to the backward masses of ancient China.

[Kenneth]

No accounting for the lunatic fringe
Chinese writting is certainly a unique invention with roots from before the earliest of these mummies, domestication of a number of animals occured long before these mummies, including horses.......fine bronze casting techniques seems to be unique to China.
Chariots are one thing that has been suggested may have been copied from 'Western' intermediaries (not Caucasian), but that is just geusswork based on comparitive design. Independant invention is still possible and no doubt the people who left these mummies wouldnt have known chariots anyway.
Wrought iron by bloomery seems to have come by way of Xianjiang, but probably by nomadic/Siberian peoples so it doesnt have to be 'caucasian'.
Nothing the mummies had technology wise could 'teach' the Chinese anything, and this area is quite marginal to the development of the ancient central states culture, or even modern China itself untill Ching, so direct contact with early Chinese 'high' civilisation wouldnt be possible.
Still, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Influences from outside China and Chinas influence on the outside world can be noticed in other ways (art/technology & trade of materials) but I have never heard that the mummies could have taught the central plains anything as they were already into the bronze age Shang by then and already recognisably Chinese in material culture.
Funnily enough, the Chinese might have been able to teach them writting as early Europeans beyond the Greco-Roman world wouldn't have had any written script to bring.

[DaMo]

No accounting for the lunatic fringe
Chinese writting is certainly a unique invention with roots from before the earliest of these mummies, domestication of a number of animals occured long before these mummies

Well, what can you expect, since the people who make these claims are a) very biased in favor of the idea of their race's supremacy, and have a two-bit knowledge of Chinese history, aside from what they have been told by their ideological masters. To people who only get flooded with information about Caucasians in ancient China, it will look like ancient China was crawling with Caucasians. They wouldn't know about the inscriptions dating to the early/mid Neolithic in Jiahu and Dawenkou, or that a lot of ancient Chinese script was based on pictographic depictions of how things look in real life, resulting in superficial similarities with other ancient scripts. They wouldn't know about the evidence of agriculture, weaving, urbanization, arts and animal husbandry in Eastern and Central China dating well before the mummies' people settled the Tarim Basin, or that the latter did not have writing until they borrowed it from the Indic civilization. And they certainly won't bother confirming those claims before regurgitating them as an even more exaggerated rendition. Ignorance and prejudice make for a potent combination indeed.

[Daniel]

Chinese writting is certainly a unique invention with roots from before the earliest of these mummies,

Really? I thought the oldest Chinese writing yet found was from the Shang Dynasty, founded c. 1500 B.C. If the Beauty of Loulan is 4,000 years old, then she would be older than the oldest known Chinese writing.

Though certainly you're right that the Longshan and Yangshao cultures would be far older than the mummies.

Anyway on the political note, i'm curious as to how this can be used by Uyhgur seperatists to claim independence from China, last i checked they were a Turkic people, not a european one.

You're right that the Uighurs are Turkic, but I think both Turkic and European peoples are considered "Caucasian." Of course, given that the Uighurs didn't come to the Tarim area until about 842, it doesn't make much difference. The skeletons are Caucasian, but they're certainly not Uighur.

[TMPikachu]

just to let you know, there's a website and/or book called "march of the titans" which is about caucasians going around the world, creating civilization. In Asia they were the Yellow Emperor and the great dieties and the samurai :x

[DaMo]

Really?  I thought the oldest Chinese writing yet found was from the Shang Dynasty, founded c. 1500 B.C.  If the Beauty of Loulan is 4,000 years old, then she would be older than the oldest known Chinese writing. 

By "roots", he may have been referring to the collections of symbols found in the Neolithic Dawenkou and Peiligang cultures of 2800 BC Shandong and 6000s BC Henan. These symbols are believed to be ancestral to early Chinese script. Besides, Chinese writing clearly evolved from drawings of real-life objects, which would make almost certainly them indigenous. Either way, the Tarim people themselves wrote in Brahmi or Kharosthi, which were imported from the Indic cultures to the south at a much later date in the first millennium BC. If they had a system of writing that preceded the Chinese Shang-level script, I am unable to find any references to it.

You're right that the Uighurs are Turkic, but I think both Turkic and European peoples are considered "Caucasian."

That depends on how broad is your definition of Turkic. And there's the question of what original Turkic people looked like (most are mixed race today), and if there was even ever a single, nominally homogenous "Turkic race".

[Daniel]

I went and took a look at "The March of the Titans." It's written by a South African named Arthur Kemp, and it's pretty well standard-issue white supremacism. Kemp's chief thesis is that racial homogeneity is a requirement for any civilization to survive; since the white race is losing its homogeneity, Kemp says it's doomed, and the world with it.

The book is poorly researched and documented. He claims that all significant inventions originated with whites, including printing; he appears to be completely unaware of Chinese block printing or the fact that it was used to create thousands of books. He denies that China invented paper, but presents no evidence to support his claim. He does not even bother to address the Chinese invention of the compass or crossbow.

He also provides a story of the Nazi Nuremberg laws that somehow manages to overlook the part where the Jews were banned from the professions.

I see no sign that anybody in the mainstream takes Kemp seriously.

[Daniel]

By "roots", he may have been referring to the collections of symbols found in the Neolithic Dawenkou and Peiligang cultures of 2800 BC Shandong and 6000s BC Henan. These symbols are believed to be ancestral to early Chinese script. Besides, Chinese writing clearly evolved from drawings of real-life objects, which would make almost certainly them indigenous. Either way, the Tarim people themselves wrote in Brahmi or Kharosthi, which were imported from the Indic cultures to the south at a much later date in the first millennium BC. If they had a system of writing that preceded the Chinese Shang-level script, I am unable to find any references to it.

Well, is there any evidence that the two older Caucasian mummies came from a civilized people at all? No writing was found with them, I take it?

The Yingpan Caucasian shows signs of contact with Greek civilization, but that's not surprising coming after Alexander's diffusion of Greek culture far to the east. And if the Yingpan mummy is two thousand years old, then he lived well after the Han first opened the Silk Road.

[TMPikachu]

How tall were these mummies, 6' 6'' seems pretty extreme for back then.

On the book, most of the claims are based around "hey, they look white!" from art. I remember one part was 'the king of Thailand has light skin, while his subjects are dark!'

[Alexander39]

1)No doubt, this will definately be used for fuel to the fires of racial superiority of the caucasian race, thankfully there are many other artifacts in east Asia that predate these

2)Anyway on the political note, i'm curious as to how this can be used by Uyhgur seperatists to claim independence from China, last i checked they were a Turkic people, not a european one.

1)Idiots you can find in all races and cultures all over the world, their is honestly nobody that can take a monopoly on idiocy

2) Turks are caucasians like the Europeans whit a strong input of northern asian genes, they were people of the steppes so that is only natural.
Turks are not a race as such, no matter what some hotheads claims, there are a culture whit a fairly unique language, but racial they are mostly European.
Uighurs might be off the same stock as the Turks but their language certainly isn't, there is only three other places in the world you will find the same language group, A) Finland, Estonia. C) Hungary. They all belong to the Finnish-Ugrish group. So either they are turks or they are Finns/Magyars(Hungarian)

[Karakhan]

but racial they are mostly European.
Uighurs might be off the same stock as the Turks but their language certainly isn't, there is only three other places in the world you will find the same language group, A) Finland, Estonia. C) Hungary. They all belong to the Finnish-Ugrish group. So either they are turks or they are Finns/Magyars(Hungarian)

Not really, Turks can range from pure Northern Mongoloids to Caucasians and Finnic types.. however in the context of Xinjiang, it is likely that the original Uighurs were Mongoloid (probably the same stock as the Mongols) and intermixed with the Indo-European inhabitants of Xinjiang, which resulted in the Uighurs of today.

The physical change between different Turkic groups is actually rather gradual, with the farthest Eastern group, the Yakuts, being the "most Mongoloid" and the farthest western group , the Karaims, Gaugauz, Turkish, and Crimean Tatars, being the most Caucasoid. every Turkic ethnic group has physical appearances that are somewhere in between. The two noticable mixes are the Bashkorts (Bashkirs) and Turkmen