The Tarim mummies

Bodies preserved by the dryness of the Tarim Basin, the earliest group dated 2135 to 1623 BC and others running down to the last centuries BC, found around Lop Nur, Subeshi, Loulan and along the southern rim near Khotan and Cherchen. What made them famous was how they looked: hair from blond through red to deep brown, long, curly and braided, the Cherchen Man reddish and the Beauty of Loulan auburn, dressed in wool and fur, felt hats, tartan-patterned leggings and leather boots, the twill weave among them the easternmost example of that technique known. For decades that was read as proof of a migration out of the western steppe. Then the genomes were sequenced in 2021 and the answer was stranger: the early mummies are about 72 percent Ancient North Eurasian and 28 percent Ancient Northeast Asian, with no detectable Western Steppe ancestry at all. They were a local population, genetically isolated, who had somehow acquired wheat, dairying and the loom. Xinjiang Museum, Urumqi.