Category Archives: Tocharians

The paper that reported on the data from the famous “Tarim Mummies” is out. If you don’t have a good grasp of the alphabet soup of ancient early Holocene populations, […]

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Eurogenes points me to a new paper in Current Biology, Ancient Genomes Reveal Yamnaya-Related Ancestry and a Potential Source of Indo-European Speakers in Iron Age Tianshan. The conclusion: Combining both the genetic and archaeological evidence, we here provide the first direct evidence of an early stage of population admixture around 2,100 BP in Xinjiang in […]

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Uyghur boy from Kashgar
Every few years a story crops up about “European-looking” people in northwest China who claim to be of Roman origin. A “lost legion” so to speak. I’ll admit that I found the stories interesting, amusing, if  implausible, years ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. This is almost like the “vanishing blonde” […]

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Razib Khan