Bronze Age Western Mummies Were Genetically Local Loners

For decades, the Tarim Basin mummies of China’s Taklamakan Desert puzzled archaeologists. Naturally preserved by the dry, salty sands, these Bronze Age people had felt hats, woven wool, and faces that looked startlingly Western. Scholars assumed they were migrants from the west — perhaps Indo-European herders or Central Asian farmers who had wandered in.

In 2021, a genomic study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and published in Nature overturned that idea. Researchers sequenced the genomes of 13 individuals dated to roughly 2,100–1,700 BCE (plus five older neighbours). The mummies showed no admixture with surrounding Holocene populations — they were a previously unknown genetic isolate.

They weren’t newcomers. They were locals who had stayed put for millennia.

Instead, the Tarim people were direct descendants of the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), a Pleistocene group that had largely vanished elsewhere after the last Ice Age. Yet though genetically sealed off, they were culturally cosmopolitan, eating West Asian wheat and dairy, East Asian millet, and Central Asian medicinal plants.