The repertoire of names used in aDNA research often derives from implicit frames of reference that draw on tradition, scholarly practice, and habit. But these names can also be explicitly mandated by authorities that monopolize the power to define social identities. This chapter focuses on contemporary China, where there is a state-mandated framing of identities, policed by government authorities and dictating the image of a “China” that has dominated its region since ancient times. This places heavy, inescapable constraints on how past and present human groups must be named and discussed. These constraints impact significantly on aDNA research, which like all science in China must conform to the nationalist ideas embraced by the current one-party state. These constraints are often not understood or acknowledged in Western accounts of aDNA research in China—such as the ones I cite here—which generally go along with them, and fail to recognize how they frame and constrain the research. My sample size of aDNA research on China is not large, but I believe that when considered in the context of today’s aggressive Chinese nationalism and how it affects our view of the past, these initial findings are suggestive.
Before I discuss China and the consequences of the new Chinese nationalism for archaeology and aDNA studies in this region, a few general observations should be made that are relevant to aDNA studies more broadly. One consequence of the act of naming is the implication that the named phenomena possess a coherence and stability. This can mask both their complexity, their change over time, and their process of formation. We end up assuming that all phenomena are fixed with a core essence, and we may even assume that only that which can be precisely measured, delineated, and identified is real at all.5
The Denisovans, first identified in Russia and recently confirmed as having lived in East and Southeast Asia, provide a powerful example of how the act of naming ancient people can mislead us badly and make us forget the process through which they are created. The Denisovans, hominids related to both Neanderthals and modern humans, were given their name after the Siberian site of their discovery, the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. A few bones and teeth provided recoverable genetic material, which first enabled their identification and classification as a species separate from other relatives. The species was recently confirmed by aDNA from another skeletal fragment, as well as from soil samples from a cave on Chinese territory.6 Further discoveries of Denisovan-like DNA in present-day people in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and elsewhere have suggested an underlying, yet unmapped, history of interaction with Homo sapiens comparable to our drawn-out interaction with the Neanderthals, who similarly “live on” inside us.7
Many scientists know that these discoveries mask a story of evolutionary change that is more complex and extensive than we are yet able to understand. From the moment the Denisovans were named and their story was told by science writers, however, they came to be understood in society at large as a single, coherent group of people, wandering from Central Asia all the way to Island Southeast Asia, an “elusive bunch” moving in to sleep with the natives.8 Scientists may be clear that we have limited knowledge, and know only that between Siberia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea exchanges of genetic material occurred over many tens of thousands of years. However, an image emerges, not of complex patterns of change, but of groups of people packing their bags to move across the landscape.
This is an example of how modern-day concepts of people as ethnicities shape our understanding of the distant past, even though ethnicity as such may not even be salient or relevant for the times when the Denisovans lived. We can be sure, however, that they did not call themselves Denisovans—just as the ancient inhabitants of what is today China did not think of themselves as living in China, regardless of what today’s rulers of China would like us to think.
The Origins of China’s New “Genetic” Nationalism
China’s recent turn toward an aggressive new—and increasingly genetically defined—nationalism is the latest chapter in a long struggle over the identity of China the nation and the Chinese people after the fall of the last empire. To understand the place of aDNA in current Chinese nationalism, it is necessary to recap this history.
As a political entity, China can be traced back to the second millennium BCE, to the early Bronze Age kingdoms in what is today northern China that were based on agriculture, mining, and war. These kingdoms were overcome by the first large conquest empire in the third century BCE, which created a structure that has been resuscitated again and again over the last two millennia. This suggests a continuity that is partly due to the continuing survival of the written language of the Bronze Age and imperial classics, deployed even when “alien” or “barbarian” dynasties came in to take over and revive the empire.9
Until 1912, China was, in other words, not a nation but a conquest empire. It claimed to rule the world, “all under heaven.” The key tenets of imperial ideology were not about race or ethnicity. Instead, non-Chinese were regarded as inferior barbarians who would all eventually submit to Chinese rule.10 After Republican Chinese revolutionaries overthrew the last dynasty in 1911–1912, they grappled with how China could become a modern unified nation-state like Japan and the countries of Europe, which all claimed a majority ethnicity coinciding with the state: the nation-state.11 For many Chinese intellectuals, China now became a “race-nation,”12 in which the older imperial idea of innate civilizational superiority was merged with European-derived notions of a superior “race” in charge—the “Chinese race.”13 Some Chinese nationalist intellectuals (including the most famous Republican, Sun Yat-sen) advocated turning the empire into a pure, unified state without recognition for the diverse peoples that inhabited it.14 They also touted the Yellow Emperor, a late-nineteenth century invention, as an ancestor of the Han Chinese. The Han “group,” which today counts as the dominant ethnic group in China, was actually invented in its present form only in the late nineteenth century, as part of the nationalist drive that copied ideas about ethnicity and modern ethnopolitics from Japan and Europe. In the 1950s, the “Han Chinese” label was designed to comprise over 90 percent of the population, despite the huge internal differences—including linguistic ones.15 Most international geneticists and others don’t know this history, and habitually go along with the Chinese fiction that the Han Chinese is an ancient people existing in its present form since ancient times, and now claimed to be “the world’s largest ethnic group.”16
The Chinese communists promised in the 1930s that if they came to power, each of the peoples conquered by the past empires would be allowed to separate from China to form independent countries. This included Tibet, the Uyghurs in “Xinjiang” (China’s “New Frontier” in Central Asia, conquered in the eighteenth century) and other peoples. But when they got into power in 1949, the Communists reneged on the promise, instead introducing a Soviet-inspired model with nominal autonomy for “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu). These groups were, in reality, subjected to Han Chinese rule and heavy-handed cultural assimilation, in obvious continuity with the empire, but now with a nationalist dimension.17
The new official “truth” was that the modern nation China had always existed its current, modern size.18 Moreover, the Communist regime insisted that despite the distinctive non-Chinese languages and cultures of the non-Han ethnic minorities, they too had always been part of a single, mysteriously united, Chinese ethnicity (Zhonghua minzu). In this “Chinese super-nation,” the Han were counted as the dominant faction, and all peoples present on today’s map of China were seen as having always been destined to merge into this entity, guided in this “development” by the innately superior Han.19
When this idea was fashioned from the 1950s onward, it could still only be vaguely justified in terms of genealogy, history, and archaeology. Genetics could not yet be used to prove such links or serve as a tool of Chinese statecraft, as it is today. Instead, so-called ethnohistorians stepped up to reread the Chinese classics in order to show how all the various peoples named there really corresponded to modern-day ethnicities (which find their meaning in contributing to the formation of China).20
When modern archaeology came to China in the early twentieth century, Chinese archaeologists continued the quest to reconfirm the classics and assemble a new revised story of an autochthonous Chinese civilization.21 But excavations yielded voluminous discoveries of previously unknown and nameless prehistoric people who had lived across the East Asian mainland during Neolithic times. At first, this presented a difficult challenge for the orthodox conception of China. Where had these peoples come from? However, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese archaeologists synthesized a new national (pre)history according to which autochthonous Neolithic peoples across East Asia all merged into the ethnically Han Chinese nation.22 Preferably, the “Chinese” even formed a distinct branch of human evolution—an effort to avoid the idea that the Chinese, like everyone else, might be descendants of migrants from Africa.23
Even more important, however, is the glorification of the “rejuvenated” nation and the past empires, which now dominates official discourse in China.24 This stands in direct conflict with earlier communist ideas about inequality, exploitation, and class struggle. The solution has been to drop class struggle and focus on the glory of China.
Needless to say, the whole theory of an Ur-Chinese race-nation that expanded and swallowed up others because of its superior virtue, embodied by the emperors, is false and misleading. When the Chinese ethnohistorians and archaeologists interpreted the movement of named ethnic groups on their map as proof of the real migrations of peoples, they ignored the fact that the history they traced was not one of migrations, but mostly of the Chinese empires expanding by force and conquering others. What the empire actually did was to recycle its set of names for the barbarians of each cardinal direction and shift the labels to new, yet-to-be conquered peoples.25 This is one of the most striking examples anywhere of how human populations and the ethnic labels imposed on them are not the same thing—and this despite the long-standing Chinese obsession with the “rectification of names,” that is, uniting the name and the reality it supposedly refers to.26
Enter the New Genetics
The modern-era Chinese nationalist longing for national purity and unity was adopted by the Communist Party leaders in the 2010s.27 In 2017, the long-running project of assimilating the non-Chinese—inherited from the empire’s ideology of civilization—was aggressively accelerated with the forced assimilation of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, a wide-ranging campaign with atrocities that already meets the definition of genocide.28
This genocide, which today very much frames the current practice of genetics, archaeology, and other sciences in China, is carried out by the full machinery of the Chinese state, which combines and uses new technologies for a surveillance program unprecedented in history. This includes AI-driven face recognition, records of the iris, voice, gait, blood type and fingerprints, the massive collection of DNA from the entire population, as well as QR-coding homes and tracking phones.29 The collected information is being used to detain massive numbers of people in camps and forced-labor factories, while children are confiscated in the hundreds of thousands and cut off from their family and culture.30 Also, large numbers of Uyghur women have been sterilized by force.31
How is the genetic information used and how does it relate to the state’s orthodox version of Chinese identity? One obvious use is the immediate practical use of racial profiling of Uyghurs and other Central Asian people in order to identify and classify them, so they can be targeted with coercive and destructive measures.
The Chinese government has never explicitly stated precisely what other purposes the accumulation of the massive data-banks of genomic information will serve. Even so, the gathering of DNA is also increasingly done on people in the Han Chinese majority in a compulsory or semimandatory manner on a mass scale across China. The collecting of DNA now intentionally targets ordinary citizens’ patrilineal connections, traced over several generations, by harvesting male Y-chromosome genetic data, which is then incorporated into the world’s largest database of such information.32 While the ultimate purpose remains unclear, it may mirror the goals apparently pursued by the regime in the areas inhabited by ethnic minorities: to accurately delineate, catalog, and identify individuals over time, with a certain time depth, so as to be able to manipulate or eliminate undesirable units of the broader population.
The first time I heard of the new, expansive DNA collection was in the incident of a young Chinese man who had created an app to help connect people whose social media messages had been deleted by the authorities. He was quickly sought out at home by the police, who forced him to sign a statement that he would never do such a thing again, and took his blood and DNA without explanation.33
The Chinese state’s DNA database forms part of the build-up of precrime policing, which can combine DNA-based identification with face recognition and personal history for an instant, real-time identification. The technologies are developed by the burgeoning Chinese genomic and surveillance industries, and with the aid of Western counterpart companies, universities, and investors.34 It surely also has to do with the nascent “social credit” system, by which ordinary Chinese people—not members of the party elite—are constantly ranked.35 There are also credible reports that the Chinese regime actively collects DNA on foreigners and harvests vast amounts of personal information abroad. This DNA information can be seen as a tool of global racial profiling that will enable the use of ethnic or “racial” characteristics in the Chinese regime’s biopolitical management of people worldwide.36
Ancient DNA, China, and the “World’s Largest Ethnic Group”
Since its beginnings in China, genetics has been used to try to describe and delineate the nation and its constituent peoples in order to control them and, in the case of the non-Chinese ethnicities, construct a narrative about their necessary, subservient relation to the nation’s majority group.37 Huge volumes of research have been put out in this vein—from earlier descriptive studies of ethnic distinctions (exemplified by the curious body of literature on the dermatoglyphics or fingerprint patterns of minorities) to the current, more sophisticated and AI-engineered study of human DNA variation by ethnicity.38
For this chapter, the two most important aspects of this research are, first, the potential challenge of aDNA to the orthodoxy of Chinese national identity and how this challenge is met in Chinese research and, second, how the story of aDNA is being incorporated into the state narrative mounted to erase the Uyghurs and other targeted minorities.
Recent breakthroughs in genetics and ancient genomics promise new possibilities for the delineation, identification, and possible manipulation of ethnic groups. The stunning successes in collecting and analyzing the DNA from living people, which has been used to build deep “family trees” of populations going from the present back into history,39 as well as the successful extraction and analysis of DNA from ancient remains—all of this might have presented a challenge to the state orthodoxy of Chinese identity. Yet, this orthodoxy seems to be holding up in the same way that it withstood the potentially devastating archaeological discoveries of an unknown, pluralistic Neolithic, which, as mentioned above, was nevertheless coopted into the narrative of an eternal, dominant “China.”
Recent aDNA research in China is framed according to the reigning view of an unstoppable, “natural” expansion of the ancestors of the (superior Han) Chinese, who merged and created a “China” millennia before one existed in written history. Chinese archaeogeneticists are successfully continuing the twentieth-century efforts to extend the concept of China backward in time.40 Instead of the pottery traditions used in earlier archaeology, these scientists build on new genetic data that suggest a similar process of how a Han Chinese genome merged together.
One representative and much-cited piece has Melinda Yang, a scholar of Chinese origin based in the United States, as its main author.41 It draws on genetic material from “26 ancient individuals from northern and southern East Asia spanning 9500 to 300 years ago,” and seizes on how the diversity of an earlier Neolithic decreases through a dramatic “admixture” process which implies the unification of a China-to-be.42 This argument is underpinned by the constant reference to the sites of the samples as derived from “China.” While the geographical term “East Asia” is sometimes used, the article mostly speaks in terms of northern and southern China, as if the ancient south (East Asia south of the Yangtze River) was already Chinese, even though the conquest of this region and the destruction of its previous cultures actually took place in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. This is one of many examples of how contemporary Chinese archaeogenetics projects the term “China” backward in time, not just as a shorthand, but to suggest it existed—a move that we find repeated elsewhere in the world, for similar reasons and in similar nationalistic contexts.43
In the article by Yang and colleagues, we see recently published aDNA data marshaled as confirmation of what earlier population genetics studies of living groups have already suggested: while today’s southern Chinese sometimes carry the same genetic variants of those speakers of Austronesian languages who dispersed from today’s China into the Pacific and beyond, the Austronesian cultures south of the Yangtze were destroyed and replaced during prehistory.44 Austronesian speakers may have been the first East Asian rice-growing people in the Yangtze valley—but their entire language family and their cultures are now completely extinct in mainland China. All that remains are a few obscure loanwords in Chinese.45 Their languages survive today only because the language family spread first to Taiwan and from there to the Philippines, the Pacific, much of Southeast Asia, and even Madagascar. On the mainland, the story is one of Chinese-speaking peoples’ displacement and assimilation of older southern cultures in the south region from the Yangtze and southward, which in prehistoric times was more like an extension of the diversity of Southeast Asia.
Against this background, it is fascinating to see how the new research by the team headed by Melinda Yang is presented to confirm the genetic homogenization of “China’s South.” While Yang’s article uses terms like “human population shifts” and does not contain any explicit statements that the text is about the creation of China, a news release from the American Association for the Advancement of Science jumped to the conclusion that the article “reveals [the] genetic history of China” through aDNA.46 In making this claim, the association goes along with the Chinese researchers’ language and with much common practice. The news release speaks of the great replacement in what is today southern China only as a matter of how “northern populations spread southward, transforming southern China’s Austronesian genetic ancestry,” which in turn “gave rise to modern population genetics.”47 This is a dressed-up way of saying that modern China emerged from the displacement and assimilation of more ancient southerners.
Other ancient DNA studies are even clearer in their objective of reconfirming the ancestry of China and its dominant people today—the Han Chinese—as the “World’s Largest Ethnic Group.”48 In a paper written by population geneticist Charleston Wen-Kai Chiang and colleagues, the ancient coherence and expansion of the Han people are attributed to “their advantage in agriculture and technology,” which led their population “to become the largest ethnic group today in China.”49 This is stated about an identity that was actually constructed in the late nineteenth century in response to European nationalist ideas about unitary nations and national origins. We now see it affirmed—and “confirmed”—by the prestige of genomic science.
Many geneticists who write these treatises are sophisticated scientists who are conversant with the methods and theories in their field. Yet, they cannot easily escape the dilemma inherent in how their research is framed conceptually, as they are dependent on terms such as “China,” “Han Chinese,” “minorities,” and so on. Thus, there is a widespread lack of attention to the potential problems inherent in this type of research.
I suggest that this situation results from two main factors. The first is the inertia of inherited concepts, names, and labels that scholars recycle and apply without thinking. This issue is not unique to China; it exists in other parts of the world, where names and labels are only recently coming under debate. The second factor is more important and insidious. For the reasons I have explained above, political leaders as well as nationalist academics in China will frequently declare what is the “correct” approach to archaeology and genetics. Scholars cannot go against such declarations. In the current climate, there is a shrinking space for public debate and it is unthinkable for a scholar to publish unorthodox ideas or a radical rethinking of a field. Instead, scholars pursue research within the parameters set by government authorities and policies—and this is so even for scholars based outside of China, who can be denied visas if they show themselves too unorthodox.
As archaeologist and anthropologist Erika Evasdottir has described in her 2004 book Obedient Autonomy, archaeologists, just like geneticists and other scientists in China, try to maintain some creative space within these parameters.50 Concretely, this means that in order to preserve limited freedom to pursue their own favorite issues, archaeologists seldom violate the tenets set down by officialdom regarding the sensitive questions of how China came to be, Chinese identity, and so forth. This is especially the case now that China’s top party leader—as we will see below—has personally laid out an agenda on archaeology, culture, and history.
In the case of aDNA, the leading Chinese geneticist Fu Qiaomei is an outstanding example of this “obedient autonomy.”51 In China, she is sometimes featured on state television, cheerfully discussing topics such as “the genetic histories of the Chinese.” Here, she brilliantly navigates the set limits while presenting the new research on admixture events in high antiquity that created the Chinese people, lending this axiom new scientific authority.
The space available in China for public debate and criticism has been cut drastically under the current General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping. Since Xi came to power in 2012, he has systematically reasserted and increased the party’s control and censorship of all media and all publishing. He is directly responsible for the atrocious policies in Xinjiang, which he has publicly described as “totally correct.”52 His top priority is making China great again, and he therefore takes a keen interest not only in armaments and aircraft carriers, but also in archaeology and history. While Xi does not get into specifics of genetics, he appropriates the term “DNA” (used interchangeably with the Chinese word for gene, jiyin) to speak of the “DNA” of the Chinese nation—an unexplained but scientific-sounding and therefore seemingly authoritative abstraction of the nation’s enduring essence.53
In November 2020, President Xi published an article in his own name, disseminated throughout official media, where he mobilizes “DNA” to speak of the achievements of the Chinese nation across the millennia, which Xi also specifies as archaeology’s task to describe and glorify.54 He enshrines detailed accounts of archaeological findings and promotes a deeply essentialist idea of a “rejuvenated” China, “the Chinese nation’s undying, everlasting, never-fading cultural DNA” (Zhonghua minzu sheng sheng bu xi, chang sheng bu shuai de wenhua jiyin).55
Such pronouncements cannot be openly contradicted by anyone. Just as in Mao’s and Stalin’s time, they also have an increasing tendency to be copied and integrated into the writings of every scientist as part of an openly and unapologetically politicized science.
There is an inherent tension between the conditions for Chinese scholars operating in China, and those on the outside who can theoretically still critique these Chinese constraints and the state orthodoxy about history. This tension enters a grey zone in situations where, for example, Chinese scholars undertake genetic research in China but are based abroad, or where they have foreign coauthors. As for non-Chinese scholars, their awareness of the nature and consequences of contemporary Chinese nationalism will vary greatly. If they lack sufficient awareness and/or are not fully engaged with the work, they may find themselves inadvertently signing off on or copying not just the essentialized Chinese ethnonationalism, with its framing and vocabulary for talking about its ancestry, but even the general secretary’s guidance, and the genetics abuse in Xinjiang.56 If they should refuse to obey the party line, or dare speak against it, they may be blocked from China.
The Incoherent Other
In this penultimate section, I return to the use of aDNA in the erasure of unwanted ethnicities, and its role in the current Chinese government’s project of unifying the Chinese nation to make it “rejuvenated.” Here I seek to show that, in great contrast with how aDNA has been used to reconfirm the perceived unity and development of the dominant Han Chinese as the world’s largest ethnic group (as discussed above), ethnic minorities are, at the same time, shown as “always already” incoherent and ultimately nonviable. Their inevitable fate is therefore to be assimilated into the unified Chinese nation.
This interpretation of aDNA research in China is no surprise. As we have seen, archaeologists have long been instructed to interpret their findings to promote the glorious history of the nation. Indeed, at the outset of the current genocide in Xinjiang, officials renewed their call on archaeologists to prove in their work that the region has been part of China “since ancient times.”57 The officials already know that in the nationalist climate in China, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for any archaeologist to publish anything that contradicts the narrative of the state (or its leader) about the antiquity and glory of China. In this vein, “minorities” are invariably confirmed as fading appendages who at most can get a nod for having contributed to China’s greatness.
But there is more. The minorities must also be described as inherently incoherent: they do not coalesce into glorious nations. Not only was Xinjiang always Chinese—a statement plainly at variance with the truth—but the peoples who live there now and yearn for genuine autonomy must themselves be described as historical failures.
The tone for this project has been set by the central government itself in one of the many “white papers” issued on Xinjiang.58 This is a fascinating, if repugnant, text that reiterates the state narrative on the formation of China, and in the process even presents the imperial-era Chinese set of terms for the barbarians of the four directions as real, actual “ethnic groups.”59 This is another example of how the alternate reality created by the state’s effort to interpret and name the past is presented as an uncontestable historical fact. On Xinjiang, the paper insists not only that the central Asian region has been a part of China since ancient times, but that any and all of the independent kingdoms (of which there were many) that have ever existed historically in that region “were all local regimes within the territory of China; they were never independent countries.” In particular, the paper states that there was never a “so-called” modern East Turkistan republic (although such a republic was indeed twice set up in the 1930s and 1940s): “Xinjiang Has Never Been ‘East Turkistan.’ ”60
As for Islam, which is widely prohibited and persecuted as part of the genocidal program in the region, the religion is described as having been forced on the people by outsiders, rather than being the choice of the local Uyghurs themselves. Moreover, the paper argues that the people who are called “Uyghurs” today were formed by various migrations and mergers, including “the Han people.”61 That is, the “Uyghur”—today a people of at least twelve million, with a long history of writing, literature, and other distinct cultural achievements—is not really a coherent thing.
As if on cue, new aDNA research can be seen to affirm these guidelines from the powers that be. This research claims that the peoples who have lived in this region, unlike the Han Chinese, never coalesced into enduring nations. Instead, they are mixed, without achieving an essential, Chinese-styled “unity.” For example, one recent article by anthropologist Wenjun Wang and colleagues aims to “understand the genetic history of Xinjiang.”62 It draws on aDNA from 237 samples in the region, suggesting that this shows past “intense admixture with high genetic diversity” and that “future studies with ancient genomic data will reveal more admixture patterns in this region,” that is to say, not cohesion, as in the case of China.63 I believe this can only be read as portraying diversity as hopelessly splintered and not viable, because not “united.”
In genetics proper, genetic diversity as such is not necessarily infused with such politics. It can even be an indicator of antiquity, since a life-form with a long history in a place has had more time to diversify. But I submit that here, outside of the genetic definition, diversity is being used to signify weakness, and mixture disunity. As we have seen, the preferred Chinese story, seemingly confirmed by the new archaeogenetics, is an amalgamation from the center, whose ancestry is ascribed to the core of that center. In this light, the findings of genetic disunity (“diversity”) in the region of the Uyghurs is not coincidental—rather, they are the direct or indirect result of policy directives to scholars.
In another similar example, geneticist Qidi Feng and colleagues speak of a “complex scenario of ancestral origins and admixture history” in the midst of “massive migrations” in ancient times, as part of the (splintered) genetic history of the Uyghur people who today live in the Xinjiang region.64 Back in 2010, Chunxiang Li and colleagues wrote about the “West-East admixed population” that supposedly characterizes Xinjiang—a move that I understand as emphasizing that the Uyghur nation does not stand on its own as a coherent entity, but wavers between West and East.65 And in 2015, Shi-Zhi Gao and colleagues emphasized that Xinjiang is (unfortunately) a “crossroads,” but (thankfully) experienced the in-migration of ancient Chinese people already in the Bronze Age.66
None of this is coincidental. The findings are meant to show that humans in the Xinjiang region have never arrived at anything like coherence or unity. The thrust of these studies is that the region’s people have been unable to achieve an independent existence, at best existing as fleeting, temporary historical appendages to the body of an enduring China. This is the result desired by state officials, produced within the official framing provided by the state, and aided by foreign scientists and publishers who relay it without comment or without examining the life of the labels in use.
Finally, the most recent example is the curious battle over the Tarim mummies. These comprise a series of human remains found in the deserts of today’s Uyghur region, dating back to the second and first millennia BCE and having features that have historically been interpreted as “European.” This has even led some scholars to argue that the mummified people were the forebears of speakers of Tocharian, an Indo-European language also attested from the region.67
