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Fragments of the Tocharian Between 1902 and 1914 the German Ethnological Institute sent repeated expeditions into the great Taklamakan desert of Central Asia, in search of ancient manuscripts that had survived destruction due to the arid climate of the Tarim Basin. One expedition brought back fragments of a manuscript written in a hitherto unknown language but employing a familiar North Indian script. Later dubbed Tocharian A, the language was deciphered by two linguists at Germany's Gottingen University, Emil Siel and Wilhem Siegling. The parchment turned out to be part of the Maitreyasamiti-Nataka, a Sanskrit Buddhist work in the Mahayana canon...

Tocharians The Tocharians were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BCE to the end of the 1st millennium CE. Their language is called Tocharian. Archaeology The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BCE until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century CE. "Tocharian donors", possibly the "Knights with...

Burushaski is a language spoken in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. It is spoken by 40,000 to 50,000 people. It has no known relatives and some believe it maybe a remnant of a prehistoric language. Burushaski is like Ainu and Basque, language isolate with no known relatives. Language Museum Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram MountainsWikipedia-Burushaski

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken. Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell...

Thanks to the careful work of archaeologists, we learned more in the past year about Stonehenge's hidden monuments, Richard III's gruesome death and King Tut's mummified erection. From the discovery of an ancient tomb in Greece to the first evidence of Neanderthal art, here are 10 of Live Science's favorite archaeology stories of 2014. 1. An Alexander the Great-era tomb at Amphipolis [snip] 2. Stonehenge's secret monuments [snip] 3. A shipwreck under the World Trade Center [snip] 4. Richard III's twisted spine, kingly diet and family tree [snip] 5. A teenager in a "black hole" [snip] 6. Syria by satellite...

For some cheese lovers, the older and stinkier the cheese, the better. Well, what about a cheese that's been aging for 3,600 years? Yellow lumps, believed to be the world's oldest cheese, were found on mummies buried in the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China. The cheese, which was found during archaeological excavations that took place between 2002 and 2004, dates to as early as 1615 BC. The cheese was found on the necks and chests of the mummies. The multiple layers of cowhide the mummies were buried in, and the dry, salty desert helped preserve the cheese....

A giant Chinese dustball weighing hundreds of thousands of tons circled the world at high altitude in under two weeks, scientists have shown. A group of Chinese and Japanese scientists claimed that the dustball, which weighed 800,000 tons, was kicked up during a storm in 2007 in the Taklamakan desert. The desert, which is roughly the size of France, lies in China's far-Western Xinjiang province, and is fringed by mountains on three sides, including the Pamir mountains on the border with Afghanistan and the Karakoram range, an extension of the Himalayas. The dust ball was formed when a wind storm...

[I]n the heart of the Taklamakan... [t]he fresco of Buddhist tales was painted on the earthen walls of the Dandanulike Temple in the south of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Discovered in 30 pieces by a Sino-Japanese archaeology group in October 2002, it is believed to date back to the Tang Dynasty of the late seventh century... [E]xperts believe parts had been stolen and some taken by a Swiss botanist in the 1920s, as his name card and a dozen sheets of a German language newspaper were found at the site. The remainder had been damaged by wind and sand,...

26 September 2014 Last updated at 02:31 Xinjiang unrest: China raises death toll to 50 Fifty people died in violence on Sunday in Xinjiang, Chinese state media said, in what police called a "serious terrorist attack". Earlier this week state media reported the incident in Luntai county but gave the death toll as two. On Thursday a state news portal said 40 "rioters", six civilians and four police officers were killed. No reason was given for the delay in reporting. Violence has been escalating in Xinjiang in recent months. The region in China's far west is home to the Muslim...

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers working in the ancient Yanghai graveyard in China's Tarim Basin has uncovered what appears to be the earliest example of trouser wearing. The research team has published a paper in the journal Quaternary International describing the pants and why they were likely developed to assist with riding horses. The Tarim Basin in western China is host to the famous Yanghai tombs, a large ancient burial ground that dates back thousands of years—thus far over 500 individual gravesites have been excavated. In this latest find, two adult males (believed to be herders and warriors) both approximately...

Bruce BowerMay 31, 2014, 7:14 AM The oldest known trousers, including this roughly 3,000-year-old pair with woven leg decorations, belonged to nomadic horsemen in Central Asia. Two men whose remains were recently excavated from tombs in western China put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. But these nomadic herders did so between 3,300 and 3,000 years ago, making their trousers the oldest known examples of this innovative apparel, a new study finds. With straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch, the ancient wool trousers resemble modern riding pants, says a team led by...

~~~snip~~~ hey did a DNA test on the Cherchen man (the 3800 year old 6'6 tall dark blonde mummy and the oldest mummy found), and the beauty of Loulan (the red hair mummy), and both of these mummies contained East Asian Mongoloid DNA. Even the Chinese scientist were astonished. The Mongoloid component of the Tocharians are not from Han Chinese or pre Han Chinese, but most likely from Altaic types of Mongoloids such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians. This obviously indicates that the Tocharians were already mixed for quite a few generations, since they looked mostly Caucasian. Very interesting....

China’s first contact with the West dates back to 200BC when China’s emperor Wu Di wanted to establish an alliance with the West against the marauding Huns, then based in Mongolia. However, the discovery of the mummies suggests that Caucasians were settled in a part of China thousands of years before Wu Di: the notion that they arrived in Xinjiang before the first East Asians is truly explosive. Xinjiang is dominated by the Uighurs, who resent what they see as intrusion by the Han Chinese. The tensions which have spilled over into violent clashes in recent years. Whatever the reason...

The DNA of some 4,000 year-old bodies unearthed five years ago in Xinjiang, in northwest China, provides scientific evidence of early intermingling between people of European and Asian origin. Zhou Hui, a professor of life science and her team discovered that some of the earliest inhabitants of the Tarim Basin in the Taklamakan Desert were of European and Siberian descent. The basin, where hundreds of well-preserved mummies have been found since the 1980s, has attracted great attention from scientists worldwide. Professor Victor Mair of Pennsylvania University claimed in 2006, "From around 1800 B.C. the earliest mummies in the Tarim Basin...

A Tarim Basin mummy photographed circa 1910 Photo: Aurel Stein The door creaked open, and there in the gloom of the newly opened room, perfectly preserved despite the passing of thousands of years, a red-haired mummy with Caucasian features stared back. It was a life-changing moment for archaeologist Professor Victor Mair, and ten years on it still gave him chills. Mair had stumbled upon the recently discovered corpses of a man and his family in a museum in the Chinese city of Ürümqi, but the shock waves of the find would be felt far and wide. The 3000-year-old Cherchen...

The discovery of Caucasoid mummies in China shows that East and West might have been meeting since the Bronze Age. Do they validate some of the ancient legends? Cherchen Man mummy Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first who broke down the barrier that was the Atlantic Ocean, that body of water that separated two continents. But no such barriers – whether natural or ideological – existed between Europe and the East – one could travel over land. Nevertheless, the discovery of Caucasoid mummies has provided not only indisputable evidence that Europeans travelled very far East, it has...

URUMQI (China): An exhibit in the museum in Urumqui gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign. But walk upstairs and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story. One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese. The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in...

Mystery Mummy A National Geographic Special about the mysterious 4,000 year old Caucasian Mummies found in China will air on The National Geographic Channel at 9:00PM EST tonight. Click here to see a short video on the subject.The DirecTV satellite channel number is 276. I have a number of books on this subject and will monitor this thread through-out the movie and discuss it with anyone who desires.

China striving for mummy identification URUMQI, China, Dec. 24 (UPI) -- A group of Chinese scientists are attempting to identify a 2,800-year-old mummy of an apparent Caucasian man found in an ancient tomb. The well-preserved mummy, that experts said is likely of a shaman in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, has been under examination since being found in 2003, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported. Especially intriguing to the scientists was the presence of a sack of marijuana leaves that archaeologists found buried with the leather-coat bound mummy. "From his outfit and the marijuana leaves, which have been confirmed by...

On the Presence of Non-Chinese at Anyang by Kim Hayes It has now become clear that finds of chariot remains, metal knives and axes of northern provenance, and bronze mirrors of western provenance in the tombs of Anyang indicate that the Shang had at least indirect contact with people who were familiar with these things. Who were these people? Where did they live? When did they arrive? Following the discovery of the Tarim Mummies, we now know that the population of the earliest attested cultures of what is present-day Xinjiang were of northwestern or western derivation. According to the craniometric...