The Tarim Basin, surrounded by mountains, may be one of the last places in Asia to have become inhabited.

Its aridity required the development of technology for water transport and storage before people could live here.

The lake system into which the Tarim River and Shule River empty is the last remnant of the historical post-glacial Tarim Lake, which once covered more than ten thousand square kilometers (thirty-nine hundred square miles) in the Tarim Basin.

Lop Nur, a group of small, now seasonal salt-lake sand marshes between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts in the southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China, is hydrologically endorheic—it is landbound and there is no outlet.

The lake from around 1800 BCE supports a thriving Tocharian culture that will last until the ninth century.

Archaeologists have discovered the buried remains of settlements, as well as several of the Tarim mummies, along the ancient shoreline of Tarim Lake.

Some of the mummies are frequently associated with the presence of the Indo-European Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin, although the evidence is inconclusive.

DNA studies of mummies from the Xiaohe burial site, located in Lop Nur, suggest that an admixed population of both west and east Eurasian origin lived in the Tarim basin since the early Bronze Age.

The maternal lineages were predominantly east Eurasian haplogroup C with smaller numbers of H and K, while the paternal lines were all west Eurasian R1a1a.

The admixture likely took place in south Siberia before the population's migration into the Tarim Basin.

The earliest Tarim mummies, found at Qäwrighul and dated to 1800 BCE, are of a Caucasoid physical type.

Their closest affiliation is to the Bronze Age populations of southern Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Lower Volga.

The mummies of the Tarim Basin, located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far west, present an ethnological mystery.

Archaeologists have found most of the mummies on the eastern (around the area of Lopnur, Subeshi near Turpan, Kroran, Kumul) and southern (Khotan, Niya, Qiemo) edge of the Tarim Basin, many of them in very good condition, owing to the dryness of the desert and the desiccation it produced in the corpses.

The mummies share many typical Caucasoid body features (elongated bodies, angular faces, recessed eyes), and many of them have their hair physically intact, ranging in color from blond to red to deep brown, and generally long, curly and braided.

It is not known whether their hair has been bleached by internment in salt.

Their costumes, and especially textiles, may indicate a common origin with Indo-European Neolithic clothing techniques or a common low-level textile technology.

Chärchän man wore a red twill tunic and tartan leggings.

Textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who examined the tartan-style cloth, discusses similarities between it and fragments recovered from salt mines associated with the Hallstatt culture.

Emperor Ming, annoyed at the Northern Xiongnu's constant incursions against Han domains, in 73 commissions his generals Geng Bing and Dou Gu to lead a major expedition against them.

They have only minor successes, but the campaign demonstrates to the Northern Xiongnu that the Han dynasty is now in a position to retaliate.

Dou, as part of his campaign, sends his assistant Ban Chao to visit the Xiyu (modern Xinjiang and former Soviet central Asia) kingdom of Shanshan (on the eastern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. (Xiyu kingdoms had long submitted to the authority of the Northern Xiongnu, and, unable to bear the heavy taxes, have often requested that the Eastern Han dynasty emperors step in and reassert the suzerainty that had been established during the Western Han Dynasty, starting with the reign of Emperor Wu. They had been constantly rebuffed however by Emperors Guangwu and Ming, who had judged their realm to be insufficiently strong to engage in a Xiyu campaign.)

Initially, the king of Shanshan is very pleased and welcomes the Han ambassadors as honored guests, but the welcome eventually fades.

Ban realizes that the Northern Xiongnu ambassadors must have arrived.

He discovers their location and, in a night raid, massacres them.

The king of Shanshan is shocked but pleased, and submits to Han suzerainty.

Ban Yong arrives in Loulan in the first month of the "following year" (3 February-3 March, 124 CE), and rewards the King of Shanshan with three new ribbons for his submission.

Following this, …