http://www.silk-road.com/22797.html
This is a rather long item, so I just pasted the URL for it.
Who were these people, and where did they come from? Where did they go to?
Political correctness is just tyranny with manners.
I wish for you the courage to be unpopular. Popularity is history’s pocket change. Courage is history’s true currency. Charleton Heston
Interesting. I believe these are the European mummies of Takla Makan in Western China. Nova had an interesting show about them in the last year or two. Info is at this site:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/chinamum/
They probably came from Northern and Eastern Europe. Why they dissapearred is still a mystery.
[Moderator Hat: ON]
I don’t see much in the way of a possible debate here. I do see a question that is better suited for General Questions. Maybe you’ll find some answers there; maybe not. But let’s try and see what happens.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
[Moderator Hat: OFF]
This really doesn’t seem to be a big thing (other than the PRC’s insistence that the area must have been populated by people with Han-like features since the days of Peking Man).
IIRC (I’ll have to dig out – possibly literally – my references later), this general area as anciently inhabited by peoples speaking (certainly writing) the Tocharian languages. These were centum Indo-European languages, probably a peripheral, fairly archaic grouping. Although ancestry does not determine language, the bearers of the Tocharian proto-language may have originated in the Caspian Basin, and migrated eastwards.
Chinese records indicate the oases of the area were inhabted by these peoples from the beginning of the Former Han to about the early years of the T’ang. They were probably “swamped”, genetically and linguistically, by surrounding Altaic and Mongol tribes (note to Leo Frankowski: the Mongols were never a Caucasoid tribe).
Confusingly enough, there were a classical people called “Tokharoi” by Mediterranean historians who bore no relationship whatsoever, as best we can tell, to the speakers of the Tocharian languages. The confusion is wholly due to XIX Century Europeans.
Eh, what’s that? God’s calling me home? Oh, OK; must be dinner time.
According to my memory, from the book The Heartland, by [author forgotten], which was a fascinating look at Central Asian history:
There was a tribe of “red-haired” Caucasoid people called the Xiong-nü living in approximately the area later inhabited by the Uighurs, though possible also what is now Mongolia, around 200 BC. They were doughty fighters and caused some trouble for the new Empire. They disappeared from Chinese ken and the Mongols replaced them as a threat, but the speculation was that they became - or were related to - the Huns or possibly the Turks, both of which groups came from Central Asia to invade Europe/Western Asia.
Personally, I wonder if there might also be some distant relation between the Xiong-nü and the Caucasoid Ainu of Japan.
The Kurgan people erupted into Europe from the area north and probably east of the Black Sea in at least 3 separate movements during the period 4400 BC to 2800 BC. Undoubtedly they brought the Indo-European language with them although anthropologist dislike associating cultures with ethnicity as Akatsukami just mentioned. One of the articles mentioned a kurgan burial in West China from which these people get their name in Europe. It is not a stretch to think that whatever drove these people out of their homeland made some go east in addition to the ones who went west to Europe. Is “Caucasoid” now a term for Indo-European? Relict pre-Indo-European populations in Europe and north Africa are various shades of “white” and I always assumed that was the definition of Caucasian.
“Caucasoid” pretty much means what “Caucasian” used to, but it doesn’t carry the additional sense of “pertaining to the Caucasus mountains”, and it has more to do with skeletal type than skin color.
It definitely does not mean “Indo-European”. Even apart from the ethic vs. linguistic question, it includes the Finnu-Ugric peoples and many other groups.
John W. Kennedy
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