Woman of the Xiaohe culture

Reconstruction of a woman based on the Bronze Age mummies of the Xiaohe Cemetery, located in the Tarim Basin, in what is now north-western China’s Xinjiang region.

The so-called Tarim mummies have always raised questions about their origins because they have a Western-like appearance that differs from the ethnic Han Chinese and the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs of modern-day Xinjiang. Despite being mixed up on the internet quite often, these mummies only have in common that they belong to individuals from the different cultures and peoples that thrived in the riverine oases of the Taklamakan desert throughout its entire pre-Islamic history and were naturally mummified by the extreme conditions.

Before the Turkic peoples from eastern Siberia migrated into the Tarim Basin in the Early Middle Ages, the region was inhabited by the Tocharians (an offshoot of the Proto-Indo-European Yamnaya culture that migrated eastwards BEFORE the Indo-European languages split into the European and Indo-Iranian branches), who were described in Classical sources and represented in Chinese murals as a red-haired, blue-eyed people that practiced Buddhism. Apart from the Tocharians, the Iranic-speaking Saka (the Scythians of Central Asia) also settled some parts of the Tarim Basin, where they gave origin to the Khotanese language.

THE MUMMIES THAT WEREN’T WHO WE THOUGHT: Considering this, and because of the Western-like features of the mummies, it had been (wrongly) assumed that the mummies of Xiaohe might have originated somewhere near Europe and that they were the earliest ancestors of the Tocharians of Antiquity. It is very likely that the mummies from the Iron Age onwards (whose clothes reflect the fashion of the steppe, unlike the Bronze Age ones) are the result of Tocharian and Saka migrations into the Tarim Basin, but a genetic study published in 2021 proved that the Bronze Age mummies of Xiaohe and Loulan (the ones wearing felt hats with feathers) were NOT Tocharians, but a much earlier previously unknown population derived from Ancient North Eurasians, the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers of Siberia that are considered to be the common ancestors of Europeans and Native Americans.