Archaeologists find 2,500-year-old Scythian mummy in Mongolia

Posted by On Holliday on August 25, 2006, 07:23 AM | #

If the Neaderthal genome is now being sequenced, if that proves feasible, then certainly, more recent specimens - particularly those described as “well preserved” - should be analyzed as well.

In addition, the link between these specimens and the development of “Han” culture should be scrutinized.

Posted by karlmagnus on August 25, 2006, 08:17 AM | #

Han culture was already fully developed 2500 years ago, if you’re trying to prove that Chinese civilisation all really came from Europe. I understand wanting to rewrite history in favor of the good guys, but let’s not be cuckoo about it!

Posted by On Holliday on August 25, 2006, 09:40 AM | #

Re: Victor Mair, there was a white presence in the far east predated 2500 years ago.

One needs not “rewrite histoty”, just report it without negelecting any facts.

Posted by Al Ross on August 25, 2006, 10:19 AM | #

One of Mair’s Tarim Basin Mummies, pictured on Wikipedia, could be Ted Turner’s twin.

Posted by J Richards on August 25, 2006, 03:23 PM | #

Bronze age skulls from Mongolia are not related to the Mongols but to prehistoric Europeans and the Ainu.  Late Pleistocene (126,000 - 12,000 years ago) populations in northwest Europe and northeast Asia show morphological similarities.

Ref:

Brace, C. L., Nelson, A. R., Seguchi, N., Oe, H., Sering, L., Pan Q. & Tumen, D. (2001) Old World sources of the first New World human inhabitants: A comparative craniofacial view. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98, 10017–10022.

Therefore, JW Holliday is right; it would be interesting to see how indigenous early Han-Chinese achievements really are.

Posted by James Bowery on August 25, 2006, 03:46 PM | #

These locations—high in the mountains of Siberia and the Tarim basin (basically salt desert) —are indicative of a people capable of adapting to extremely inhospitable environments.  I recall attending a lecture by JP Mallory at Stanford’s Silk Road series in which he discussed the Tarim Basin people.  One of the things they did that gets very little reporting is develop a very early form of irrigation—something you obviously have to do for a salt desert if you want to survive there.

It is easy to see how fragile an adaptation this might have been and how their population may have been destroyed by immigration.

Posted by wrong_and_lousy on August 26, 2006, 10:39 AM | #

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0605327103v1
“New DNA sequencing methods in conjunction with knowledge of misincorporation processes have now, in principle, opened the way for the determination of complete genomes from organisms that became extinct during and after the last glaciation.”

Which means, of course, that human remains – at least from which reasonable autosomal DNA samples can be extracted – from since the last glaciation can have their complete genomes sequenced.

Which means, in turn, information on both relationships of ancient peoples to modern populations (i.e., genetic kinship determined by neutral markers) as well as the phenotype of ancient peoples (determined by adaptive genes) can, in theory, be determined.

Posted by Han Contributions on August 26, 2006, 12:00 PM | #

Then again, we may not wish to draw too much attention to a possible white contribution to Han “culture”:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5280312.stm

Posted by hsr on August 26, 2006, 12:22 PM | #

Another article, which includes some photos:

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,433600,00.html

Posted by hsr on August 26, 2006, 12:38 PM | #

From the Spiegel article: “The mummy, which is believed to be about 2,500 years old was a 30-to-40 year-old man with blond hair, and was found in very good condition, Patzinger said. ... Parzinger said researchers believe the decorations indicated he was a man of nobility.”

Posted by karlmagnus on August 26, 2006, 01:22 PM | #

What’s wrong with strippers at funerals? Ensures you get plenty of guests for the send-off, and doesn’t leave a hangover, unlike an Irish wake.

Whether or not Han culture derives from ethnic Europeans (I doubt it, but am open to the possibility) a 2500 year old mummy proves nothing either way, since Han culture had already been going full blast for 2000 years by then.  Confucius was 57 years old 2500 years ago; it seems most implausible to suppose that he was the tall blond Nordic type.

Posted by stari_momak on August 26, 2006, 01:36 PM | #

Surely the real lesson to take from this, especially for denizens of this blog, is that race replacement happens and that an entire people and culture—an entire white, indo-european people and culture—can be wiped out, leaving no meaningful trace culturally or racially.

Posted by James Bowery on August 26, 2006, 05:10 PM | #

I should probably add that I visited the Altai Mountains in 1998 in part because of a theory I had about a more northerly silk road trade route predating what is now known as the Silk Road.  The theory I was pursuing was that a continuous water route existed from northern Japan to Finland except for a few miles of portage near Ulan Ude, and that some of the earlierst, if not the earliest silk sources were from the destruction of vast Siberian forsests by silk worms—a phenomenon that still occurs.  I stayed with the family of a geologist with Akademgorodok and stayed with a Buryat family near the Altai Mountains. 

During my visit, I mentioned the possibility of such a trade route to a guide with the local university and she mentioned, but seemed reticent to talk about some of the work going on with the burial mounds around the area.  I suspected then that they were finding northern European-like artifacts but not until the publication of this article was my suspicion confirmed.

This sort of thing makes me wonder how much has been found that has been destroyed.  Certainly, the defacement of the paintings of the Tocharian Knights near the Tarim Basin leads one to believe that not only are the people we think of as northern European easily displaced by others during migrations but that the very memory of what they had constructed and been is destroyed so there is no trace for any future generation.