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In 1991, I began the initial stage of my international project for the investigation of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Tarim mummies by focusing on their genetics.  The reason for my doing so was because that was just around the time that techniques for the study of ancient DNA were being developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.  I was fortunate in gaining the advice and support of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, eminent population geneticist of Stanford University.  Although I continued to carry out genetics research and was an author of the first paper on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Tarim mummies*, later I became disenchanted by genomic studies, not just of humans, but particularly of humans because of ulterior motives.  Due to their susceptibility to be mathematically and statistically manipulated for political purposes, genomic studies had become an ideological minefield.  Consequently, I switched the emphasis of the project to other disciplines such as textiles**, metallurgy***, physical anthropology****, archeology (burial practices, material goods, etc.)*****, micro/macrohistory******, equestrian studies*******, and, of course, linguistics********.

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*Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age

The good news is that we now have a new volume in the Cambridge University Press Elements in Ancient East Asia series:  Reconstructing the Human Population History of East Asia through Ancient Genomics, by Andrew E. Bennett, Yichen Liu, and Qiaomei Fu (12/3/24):

Summary

East Asian population history has only recently been the focus of intense investigations using ancient genomics techniques, yet these studies have already contributed much to our growing understanding of past East Asian populations, and cultural and linguistic dispersals. This Element aims to provide a comprehensive overview of our current understanding of the population history of East Asia through ancient genomics. It begins with an introduction to ancient DNA and recent insights into archaic populations of East Asia. It then presents an in-depth summary of current knowledge by region, covering the whole of East Asia from the first appearance of modern humans, through large-scale population studies of the Neolithic and Metal Ages, and into historical times. These recent results reflect past population movements and admixtures, as well as linguistic origins and prehistoric cultural networks that have shaped the region's history.

Although the authors have set an enormous task for themselves — analyzing the genomics of the whole of East Asia, which, for them, includes Southern East Asia, Northeastern Asia, Mongolia, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia, parts of Inner Asia, and their connections to contiguous and distant regions — I think that they have done a thorough, impartial job, avoiding the more sensationalistic claims of other ancient genetics researchers on Central Asia and Northeast Asia in recent years.  I have been especially impressed by the work of the lead author, Qiaomei Fu (b. 1982), who wrote her doctoral dissertation under Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.  Despite her current position as Director of the ancient DNA laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, she has resisted pressures to politicize the results of her research.

Here are the contents of the book:

• Challenges of Ancient DNA
• Middle Pleistocene Archaic Humans
• The Earliest Modern Humans in East Asia
• Overview of Ancient East Asian Modern Human Populations
• Northeastern East Asia
• The EDAR Variant
• Ancient Northeast Asian Ancestry
• West Liao River Farmers and the Origins of the Transeurasian Language Family
• Transeurasian Language Dispersal
• Contributions to Native Americans
• Southern East Asia
• Fujian Coastal Populations
• Austronesians
• Ancient Guangxi Ancestry and Admixture
• Yellow River and North Central China
• Lower Yellow River: Shandong
• Middle Yellow River: Henan
• Yellow River Origins for Sino-Tibetan Languages
• The Tibetan Plateau
• East Asian Influences on Tibetan Plateau Population Structure
• Neolithic, Late Upper Paleolithic, and Deep Paleolithic Roots
• High-Altitude Adaptations: EPAS1 and ELGN1
• Mongolia and the Eastern Steppe
• Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
• Three Bronze Age Populations
• Xiongnu and the Formation of the Present-Day Mongolians
• Xinjiang
• The Tarim Basin Mummies
• Bronze Age Xinjiang
• Iron Age and Present-Day Populations
• The Japanese Archipelago
• Jōmon Origins
• Three-Source Origin of the Modern Japanese Population
• The Korean Peninsula

Naturally, I appreciate the authors' close attention to the Tarim mummies and am pleased that they adopted an unbiased approach to one of the most ethnically sensitive regions of the People's Republic of China, which is also one of the most crucial parts of the world for understanding the development of civilizations, cultures, and languages.

Selected readings

• "Horse culture comes east" (11/15/20) — with lengthy bibliography
• "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — with extensive bibliographical resources
• "Tarim harps; pitch, tones, scales, modes, instruments, and their names" (5/21/22)
• "The sound and sense of Tocharian" (5/4/20)
• "Ancient Mummies of the Tarim Basin: Discovering Early Inhabitants of Eastern Central Asia", Victor H. Mair, Expedition (Penn Museum) (58.2 (2016)
• Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).  2 vols.
• J. P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West(London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000).
• "Early Indo-Europeans in Xinjiang" (11/19/08).
• Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawai'i Press, 2006).
• Victor H. Mair, "Language and Script: Biology, Archaeology, and (Pre)History," International Review of Chinese Linguistics, 1.1 (1996), 31a-41b.
• J. P. Mallory, "The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective", Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 (Nov. 2015); free pdf, 63 pp.
• Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West," in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61.

Addendum

From AI Overview: 

[Thanks to Wolfgang Behr]

December 19, 2024 @ 5:11 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and ethnicity, Language and genetics

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