The Mummies China Couldn't Explain

For nearly a hundred years, these mummies were treated as proof that Europeans had walked into ancient China. They lie in the Tarim Basin, in one of the driest deserts on earth, almost four thousand years old, with light brown and reddish hair, wool clothing and felt hats with feathers. Features many visitors read as European made the theory write itself: migrants from the west. In 2021, geneticists sequenced thirteen of them, and the migrants never showed up. 📖 Further reading: J.P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies, Thames & Hudson These people had no western steppe ancestry at all. They descended from the Ancient North Eurasians, an Ice Age population that had almost vanished everywhere else, and they stayed genetically isolated for thousands of years. What they did borrow was ideas. Wheat, millet, cattle and dairy. Milk proteins are still in their teeth, and some of them were buried with cheese on their bodies. Isolated in blood. Open to everything else. This is her face. Every video here is planned, written and managed on musayko.com, a platform I built for creators. Timeline History is what it looks like in use. Whose face should we reconstruct next?