The nameless, long-vanished people with brown hair…

The nameless, long-vanished people with brown hair and long noses will be found in the Small River Cemetery No. 5, lying near a dried up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, most of which is now covered by the inhospitable Takimakan desert in what is now China’s northwest autonomous province of Xinjiang.

The Afanasevo culture, as an early extreme outlier of presumably Indo-European culture, is an automatic candidate for being the earliest attested representative for speakers of the Tocharian stock; it occupied the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai Mountains during the eneolithic era, c. 3300 to 2500 BCE.

The Tocharian languages may have been introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north, as argued by Mallory and Mair (2000:294–296, 314–318)

The apparently Caucasoid trading nation had, however, disappeared from the area by 1900 BCE; its connection to the westerly and specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture, which flourished from about 2000 BCE to 900 BCE) is unknown.

Some of the two hundred mummies have been analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fujan University, who stated in 2007 that their DNA contains markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.

Carbon tests conducted at Beijing University indicated that the oldest part of the cemetery dates to 1980 BCE.

A report published by in February 2010 in the journal BMC Biology, based on studies by a team of geneticists led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University and coauthored by Li and Hui, states that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China.

The male mummies, some of which sport tattoos, had a Y chromosome mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia but rarely in China.

The mitochondrial DNA, transmitted down the female line, consists of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe.

Zhou’s team concluded that the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before their arrival in the Tarim Basin.