Secrets of the Red-Headed
Mummies From Uyghuristan

by Heather Pringle

From: hengist How could an ancient mummy found in remote China have red hair
and caucasian features? The answer has sparked a battle over smuggled DNA,
Western imperialism, and history as we know it
Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang, Victor Mair was known
mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator of obscure Chinese texts, a fine
sinologist with a few controversial ideas about the origins of Chinese culture,
and a scathing critic prone to penning stern reviews of sloppy scholarship.
Mair's pronouncements on the striking resemblance between some
characters inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Chinese symbols were
intensely debated by researchers. His magnum opus on the origins of Chinese
writing, a work he had been toiling away at for years in his office at the
University of Pennsylvania, was eagerly anticipated. But in 1988, something
profound happened to Mair, something that would touch a nerve in both the
East and the West, raising troubling questions about race, racism, and the
nature of history itself.
That year, Mair had led a group of American travellers through a small
museum in Ürümchi, the capital of China's remote northwesternmost
province, Xinjiang. Mair had visited the museum several times before, but on
this occasion a new sign pointed to a back room. "It said something like
'Mummy Exhibition,' " recalled Mair, "and I had the strangest kind of weird
feeling because it was very dark. There were curtains, I think. Going in, you
felt like you were entering another world."
In a glass display case so poorly lit that visitors
needed to use flashlights to look at its contents,
Mair spied a bizarre sight. It was the
outstretched body of a man just under six feet
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tall, dressed in an elegantly tailored wool tunic
and matching pants, the colour of red wine.
Covering the man's legs were striped leggings
in riotous shades of yellow, red, and blue, attire
so outrageous it could have come straight from
the pages of Dr. Seuss. But it was not so much
the man's clothing that first riveted Mair's
attention. It was the face. It was narrow and
pale ivory in colour, with high cheekbones, full
lips, and a long nose. Locks of ginger-coloured
hair and a greying beard framed the
parchment-like skin. He looked very Caucasian:
indeed he resembled someone Mair knew
intimately. "He looked like my brother Dave
sleeping there, and that's what really got me. I
just kept looking at him, looking at his closed
eyes. I couldn't tear myself away, and I went
around his glass case again and again and
again. I stayed in there for several hours. I was
supposed to be leading our group. I just forgot
about them for two or three hours."
Local archaeologists had come across the body
a few years earlier while excavating in the
Tarim Basin, an immense barren of sand and
rock in southern Xinjiang. The region was not the kind of place that generally
attracted well-dressed strangers. At the height of summer, temperatures in
the basin soared to a scorching 125 degrees Fahrenheit, without so much as
a whisper of humidity, and in winter, they frequently plunged far below
freezing. The desert at the basin's heart was one of the most parched places
on Earth, and its very name, the Taklamakhan, was popularly said to mean
"go in and you won't come out." Over the years, the Chinese government had
found various uses for all this bleakness. It had set aside part of it as a
nuclear testing range, conducting its blasts far from prying eyes. It had also
built labour camps there, certain that no prisoner in his right mind would try
to escape.
The Taklamakhan's merciless climate had one advantage, however. It tended
to preserve human bodies. The archaeologists who discovered the stranger in
the striped leggings marvelled at the state of his cadaver. He looked almost
alive. They named him Cherchen Man, after the county in which he was
found, and when they set about carbon dating his body, they discovered that
he was very, very old. Indeed, the tests showed that he had probably roamed
the Tarim Basin as early as the eleventh century bc. When Mair learned this,
he was astonished. If the mummy was indeed European in origin, this would
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undermine one of the keystones of Chinese history.
Scholars had long believed that the first contacts between China and Europe
occurred relatively late in world history -- sometime shortly after the midsecond
century bc, when the Chinese emperor Wudi sent an emissary west.
According to contemporary texts, Wudi had grown tired of the marauding
Huns, a nomadic people whose homeland lay in what is now southwest
Mongolia. The Huns were continually raiding the richest villages of his
empire, stealing its grain and making off with its women. So Wudi decided to
propose a military alliance with a kingdom far to the west, beyond Mongolia,
in order to crush a common foe. In 139 bc, the emperor sent one of his
attendants, Zhang Qian, on the long trek across Asia. Zhang Qian failed to
obtain the alliance his master coveted, but the route he took became part of
the legendary Silk Road to Europe. In the years that followed, hundreds of
trading caravans and Caucasians plied this route, carrying bundles of ivory,
gold, pomegranates, safflowers, jade, furs, porcelain, and silk between Rome
and the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an.
Nationalists in China were very fond of this version of history. It strongly
suggested that Chinese civilization, which had flowered long before Zhang
Qian headed west, must have blossomed in isolation, free of European
influence, and it cast early Chinese achievements in a particularly glorious
light. In one popular book, The Cradle of the East, Chinese historian Ping-ti
Ho proudly claimed that the hallmarks of early Chinese civilization --
including the chariot, bronze metallurgy, and a system of writing -- were all
products of Chinese genius alone. According to Ping-ti Ho, those living in the
ancient Celestial Kingdom had never stooped to borrowing the ideas of others
and their inventive genius surpassed that of the West.
Mair, a professor of Chinese in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, had long doubted this version of
history. He suspected that the Chinese had encountered Westerners from
Europe long before the emperor Wudi dreamed up his military alliance.
Several early Chinese books, for example, described tall men with green eyes
and red hair that resembled the fur of rhesus monkeys. Most scholars
dismissed these accounts as legendary, but Mair wasn't so sure. He thought
they were descriptions of Caucasian men. During his studies of Chinese
mythology, he had found stories strikingly similar to those in early Greek and
Roman tales. The parallels were too frequent to be mere coincidences. And
he kept stumbling across words in early Chinese texts that seemed to have
been borrowed from ancient languages far to the west. Among these were
the words for dog, cow, goose, grape, and wheel. But though Mair repeatedly
argued the case for early trade and contact between China and the West, he
had no hard archaeological evidence of contact, and no one took him very
seriously. "People would laugh at me. I said that East and West were
communicating back in the Bronze Age and people just said, 'Oh yeah?
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Interesting, but prove it.' "
Never for a moment did Mair expect to find the kind of flesh-and-blood
vindication that Cherchen Man promised. Still, he was wary of a hoax. The
man's tailored woollen clothing, with all the complex textile technology it
implied, was unlike anything Mair had ever seen from ancient Asia, let alone
a remote outpost like Xinjiang. The mummy itself seemed almost too
perfectly preserved to be true. "I thought it was part of a wax museum or
something, a ploy to get more tourists. How could they have such advanced
textile technology three thousand years ago? I couldn't put it into any
historical context. It didn't make any sense whatsoever."
Mair began asking his Chinese colleagues about Cherchen Man. He learned
that European scholars had unearthed several similar bodies in the Tarim
Basin almost a century before but had regarded them as little more than
oddities. In 1895, for example, the British-Hungarian scholar Marc Aurel
Stein exhumed a few Caucasian bodies while searching for antiquities and old
Central Asian texts in the Tarim Basin. "It was a strange sensation," noted
Stein in his later writings, "to look down on figures which but for the parched
skin seemed like those of men asleep." However, Stein and the Europeans
who followed him were far more interested in classical-era ruins than in
mummified bodies, and failed to investigate further.
Early Chinese archaeologists in the region also came across some of the
bodies, but they were no more interested than the Europeans. They thought it
likely that a few ancient foreigners had strayed into this outlying territory of
ancient China by chance. But in the 1970s, while surveying along proposed
routes for pipelines and rail lines in Xinjiang, Chinese archaeologists
happened upon scores of the parched cadavers, so many that they couldn't
excavate them all. Most of the bodies were very Caucasian-looking -- a major
discovery that went unreported outside a small circle of archaeologists in
China. The mummies had blond, red, or auburn hair. They had deep-set eyes,
long noses, thick beards, and tall, often gangly, frames. Some wore woollens
of what looked like Celtic plaid and sported strangely familiar forms of
Western haberdashery: conical black witches' hats, tam-o'-shanters, and
Robin Hood caps. Others were dressed only in fur moccasins, woollen wraps,
and feathered caps, and buried with small baskets of grain. This last group, it
transpired, contained the oldest of the Caucasians. According to radiocarbondating
tests, they roamed the northwestern corner of China in the twentyfirst
century bc, the height of the Bronze Age, just as Mair had long been
suggesting.
Not only had they wandered the Tarim Basin, they had also settled there for a
very long time. Cherchen Man had walked the Tarim deserts in the eleventh
century bc, a millennium after the earliest Caucasians. Moreover, murals from
the region depict people with fair hair and long noses in the seventh century
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ad, while some local texts of the same era are inscribed in a lost European
language known as Tocharian. If the writers were descendants of the
Caucasian-looking people who arrived in Xinjiang nearly 2,800 years earlier,
one can only conclude that this was a very successful colony.
Convinced now of the authenticity of the mummies, Mair began puzzling over
their meaning. Who were these ancient invaders, he wondered, and where
exactly had they come from?
Victor Mair is a big, rugged-looking man in his mid-fifties, a shade over six
foot one, with size-fourteen feet and the clean-cut good looks that one often
sees in former pro-football players. The American-born son of an Austrian
immigrant, he stands nearly a head taller than most of his colleagues in
China, a physical advantage that he often tries to minimize in group
photographs by stepping down off a curb or onto a lower step. He has short,
neatly combed grey hair, a large aquiline nose, observant blue eyes, and a
jesting wit he uses to particularly good effect, laughter being the best way of
bridging any awkward cultural gap. He neither smokes nor drinks, and never
did, and is, by his own admission, a born leader. Possessed of an uncommon
self-confidence, which sometimes comes across as arrogance, he is also a
man of many surprising quirks.
I got my first glimpse of this quirkiness in a downpour in Shanghai, in June of
1999. I had arranged to meet Mair in the Chinese city, where, eleven years
after first seeing the mummies, he was hoping to begin a new round of dna
testing on them. In our early phone conversations, Mair had told me that he
would be travelling with a geneticist who hoped to take tissue samples from
the Tarim Basin mummies stored at the Natural History Museum in Shanghai.
It sounded as if everything had been arranged. But as I quickly discovered
upon my arrival in Shanghai, Mair was still a long way from gathering the
samples. Housed in a small guest house for foreign lecturers at Fudan
University, he strode the hallways like a weary giant. He had just spent two
full days in meetings with his Chinese colleagues, trying to hammer out a
deal. But the talks were stalling. To clear his head, Mair invited me to join him
for a walk. In the downpour, I struggled to keep up with him, dodging flocks
of cyclists in their shiny yellow rain slickers, and black pools of nearly
invisible potholes. Mair wove around them absently. Instead of a raincoat, he
wore two long-sleeved plaid shirts, one inside the other. He didn't seem to
care that he was getting soaked.
Nothing, he explained as we walked in the rain, was
ever simple when it came to the Xinjiang mummies.
Dead as they had been for thousands of years, they
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still managed to stir strong feelings among the
living. In China, a restive ethnic minority known as
the Uyghurs had stepped forward to claim the
mummies as their own. Numbering nearly seven
million, the Uyghurs viewed the Tarim Basin as their
homeland. Largely Muslim, they had become a
subjugated people in the late nineteenth century.
During the 1930s and 1940s, their leaders managed
to found two brief republics that later fell under
Chinese control. But Uyghur guerillas continued
fighting stubbornly, until their last leader was
executed in 1961. Since then, the Chinese
government has dealt harshly with any sign of separatist sentiment. Amnesty
International's 1999 report for Xinjiang made grim reading. "Scores of
Uyghurs, many of them political prisoners, have been sentenced to death and
executed in the past two years," it noted. "Others, including women, are
alleged to have been killed by the security forces in circumstances which
appear to constitute extra-judicial executions."
Still the Uyghurs refused to give up, and when they caught wind of mummies
being excavated in the Tarim Basin, they were keenly interested. Historians
had long suggested that the Uyghurs were relative latecomers to the region,
migrating from the plains of Mongolia less than two thousand years ago. But
Uyghur leaders were skeptical. They believed that their farmer ancestors had
always lived along the thin but fertile river valleys of the Tarim, and as such
they embraced the mummies as their kin -- even though many scholars, Mair
included, suspected that Uyghur invaders had slaughtered or driven out most
of the mummies' true descendants and assimilated the few that remained.
Still, in Xinjiang, Uyghur leaders picked one of the oldest mummies as an
emblem of their cause. They named her, with some poetic licence, the Beauty
of Loulan and began printing posters with her picture. That she was so
Caucasian-looking was not a problem in Uyghur eyes: some Uyghurs had
Caucasian features. People in Ürümchi, the province's capital, were
captivated. Musicians began writing songs about her that subtly alluded to
the separatist cause.
This sudden outburst of mummy nationalism alarmed the Chinese
government. Before long, everything related to the Xinjiang mummies was
considered a matter of state security. No one in government was in any hurry
to authorize a genetic test on them. If the mummies' dna revealed even a
partial link to the Uyghurs -- a not unlikely prospect, given the Uyghurs'
mixed heritage -- it would further strengthen the separatists' claims to the
region in the eyes of the world. This was something the Chinese wished to
avoid, especially after the international condemnation of their treatment of
another ethnic minority, in Tibet. Adding to the problem was the Chinese
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sensitivity to any matter touching on the Tarim Basin. Beyond the wispy river
valleys and beneath the Tarim's bleak desert plains lay immense oil fields.
According to Chinese geologists, they contained nearly 18 billion tons of
crude, six times more than the known reserves of the United States.
Chinese officials were not the only ones worried about genetic testing.
Western scholars fretted, too. Some hated the thought that Europeans could
have succeeded in planting settlements so far into Asia thousands of years
ago. Not only did such a migration threaten the Chinese version of history; it
seemed vaguely to smack of ancient colonialism, a notion that many
historians abhor. "There's a lot of Western guilt about imperialism and
sensitivity about dominating other people," said Mair. "It's a really deep
subconscious thing, and there are a lot of people in the West who are
hypersensitive about saying our culture is superior in any way, or that our
culture gets around or extends itself. So there are people who want to make
sure that we don't make mistakes in our interpretation of the past."
Certainly, the presence of ancient Europeans in China -- even in its outer
reaches -- could be twisted and distorted to political ends: people with racial
agendas had long been searching for just such evidence. During the 1930s,
for example, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had taken an unhealthy
interest in Genghis Khan, the most famous leader of the Mongols, who in the
thirteenth century had conquered vast stretches of Central Asia, from
southern Siberia to Tibet, and from Korea to the Aral Sea. "Our strength,"
observed Hitler in a thundering speech to the commanders of Germany's
armed forces in 1939, "is in our quickness and brutality. Genghis Khan had
millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart.
History sees in him only a great state builder. . . ."
But Hitler's admiration of the ancient Mongol presented a serious problem for
a party that placed great stock in racial purity. Genghis Khan, after all, was
not Caucasian. He belonged to an Asian race that the Nazis heartily despised
as inferior. Himmler, who fancied himself a historian, finally came up with a
solution based on pure whimsy. He told one anthropologist that Genghis
Khan and his elite Mongol followers were actually Caucasians, descended
from the citizens of Atlantis who had decamped from their mythical island
home before it sank, cataclysmically, beneath the waves. These Mongol
Caucasians, Himmler claimed, were a special kind of Caucasian: German
blood flowed through their veins.
One recent book suggests that Himmler went so far as to request a collection
of mummies from Central Asia. But Mair doubted it. "In all of my reading of
works emanating from these expeditions," he said, "I have never come
across any indication that they brought such corpses back to Europe."
Even so, the bizarre racial ideas of the Nazis troubled Western scholars. They
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worried about where genetic testing of the Xinjiang mummies might lead,
and worse still, about who might ultimately try to profit from the research.
Testing the mummies was like taking a stroll through a minefield: there was
no telling what might explode in the traveller's face.
"It would be especially bad news if any of the mummies were German,"
observed Mair later, in the guest house where he was staying. "They've had
two world wars in which they were the perpetrators and if any of these
mummies were even remotely Germanic, forget it. People just wouldn't want
to talk about it."
As amazed as Mair had been by the mummies back in 1988, he hadn't had the
time to study them. In September, 1991, however, he picked up a newspaper
and read about the discovery of a frozen, partially preserved corpse of a
5,300-year-old man in a glacier along the Austrian-Italian border. This
became Europe's famous iceman, known as Ötzi.
The news startled Mair. His own father had grown up in Pfaffenhoffen, a
small Austrian village just a short distance away from where scientists had
dug the iceman from a glacier. His father's family had grazed their herds in
the same alpine meadows where Ötzi had probably wandered. The iceman, he
realized, might well be a distant relative. Might he also have had some
connection to the ancestors of Cherchen Man, who looked so much like Mair's
own brother? "I saw the headlines and I jerked," Mair recalls. "I looked at
that iceman and I said, 'These guys out in the Tarim are just like him.' One's
in ice and the others are in sand. It didn't take half a second."
Austrian scientists planned on performing sophisticated scientific tests,
including dna analysis, on the iceman. It occurred to Mair that similar tests
on Cherchen Man and his kin could do much to trace the ancestry of the
mummies. He immediately wrote to Wang Binghua, one of the foremost
archaeologists in Xinjiang, outlining the project that was forming in his mind.
He also called Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a distinguished geneticist at Stanford
University who was an expert on ancient dna. Cavalli-Sforza instantly saw
the possibilities. He recommended that Mair contact one of his former
students, Paolo Francalacci, at the University of Sassari, in Italy. Mair did just
that, and working closely with Wang over the next months he managed to
hammer out a deal with the Chinese goverment. Beijing finally gave the team
a green light in 1993.
Francalacci thought it best to collect samples from mummies left in the
ground, as opposed to bodies already stored in museums. This would reduce
the possibility of contamination with modern dna. So in Ürümchi, he set off,
along with Mair and Wang Binghua, for the well-documented grave sites
found during the Chinese pipeline and railway surveys of the 1970s and in
archaeological studies since. Dozens of these mummies, many lying in
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relatively shallow underground tombs, had been left alone because of the
enormous cost of curating them.
At each chosen grave, the young geneticist donned a face mask and a pair of
latex gloves, and docked tiny pieces of muscle, skin, and bone from the
mummies, often choosing tissue along the inside of the thighs or under the
armpits because these regions had been less exposed to the excavators. He
sealed each sample in a plastic vial. After several days, he had collected
twenty-five specimens from eleven individuals, enough for a modest study.
But there was little time for celebration. In a stunning about-face, Chinese
authorities suddenly demanded Francalacci's samples, refusing to allow them
out of the country.
Then a mysterious thing happened. Just shortly before Mair departed for
home, a Chinese colleague turned up with a surreptitious gift. He slipped five
of the confiscated, sealed samples into Mair's pocket. These had come from
two mummies. The grateful Mair passed the samples on to Francalacci, who
began toiling in Italy to amplify the dna.
For months, the Italian geneticist laboured on the mummy samples, trying to
extract enough dna for sequencing. The nucleic acids had badly degraded, but
still, Francalacci kept trying various methods, and in 1995 he called Mair with
a piece of good news. He had finally retrieved enough dna to sequence, and
his preliminary results were intriguing. The two Xinjiang mummies belonged
to the same genetic lineage as most modern-day Swedes, Finns, Tuscans,
Corsicans, and Sardinians.
The genetic studies were promising, but they only whetted Mair's curiosity. It
was not just that Cherchen Man bore an uncanny resemblance to his own
brother Dave (whom he had taken to calling Ur-David), it also had to do with
Mair's own deeply rooted beliefs. "Everything that I've done," he explained,
"even though it's been running all over the map, it's all been tied into making
things accessible to the everyday guy, the worker. That's what it's all about
and that's why I looked at these mummies. They were just everyday guys,
not famous people."
Mair had acquired this outlook at an early age. His immigrant father, whom
he adored and deeply admired, was a lathe operator for a ball-bearing
company in Canton, Ohio. His mother was a poet and songwriter. Growing up
in a working-class family, Mair was continually reminded of the importance of
ordinary people, who sweated on the assembly lines or who bent over mops
and brooms at night. These were the kinds of people history tended to
ignore.
Now, with this same instinct for the common man, Mair redoubled his efforts
to trace the mummies' ancestry. In Xinjiang, a Chinese colleague had slipped
him another parting gift: a swatch of blue, brown, and white cloth taken from
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a twelfth-century-bc mummy. The fabric looked like a piece of Celtic plaid.
Mair passed it over to Irene Good, a textile expert at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum. Good examined it under an electron microscope. The
style of weave, known as a "two over two" diagonal twill, bore little
resemblance to anything woven by Asian weavers of the day. (Indeed, it
would be almost another two millennia before women in central China turned
out twill cloth on their looms.) But the weave exactly matched cloth found
with the bodies of thirteenth-century-bc salt miners in Austria. Like the dna
samples, the mysterious plaid pointed straight towards a European
homeland.
Excited by the textile connection, Mair organized a new expedition to Xinjiang
with Good, her fellow textile expert Elizabeth Barber, and her cultural
anthropologist husband, Paul Barber. As the two women pored over the
mummies' clothing, Barber examined the bodies themselves, studying their
mummification. Mair hoped this might offer clues to the origins of the people
themselves. But the ancient desert dwellers, he discovered, had not taken
any of the elaborate measures favoured by the Egyptians or other skilled
morticians. Instead, they had relied on nature for a few simple tricks. In
some cases, family members had buried their dead in salt fields, whose
chemistry preserved human flesh like a salted ham. Often, they had arranged
the cadaver so that dry air flowed around the extremities, swiftly desiccating
the flesh. Cherchen Man, for example, had benefited from both techniques.
Mair, too, assisted in the work. In his spare time, he translated key Chinese
reports on the mummies and published them in his own journal, The Sino-
Platonic Papers. This gave Western archaeologists access to the scientific
findings for the first time. He wanted to make the mummies the focus of a
lively scientific and scholarly investigation. So he set about organizing a
major international scientific conference on the mummies, bringing leading
archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, geneticists, geographers,
sinologists, historians, ethnologists, climatologists, and metallurgists to the
University of Pennsylvania to discuss their ideas. After everyone left, Mair
dutifully edited and translated two large volumes of their papers, clarifying
their arcane prose until everyone interested in the field could understand it.
"If I have grey hair," he joked, "it was because I was sitting there slaving
over this stuff."
When he had finally finished, he sat down in his office with a pad of paper
and a pen. He sifted through hundreds of studies on matters as diverse as
linguistics, pottery styles, methods of tomb construction, and metallurgy
across Eurasia over the past seven thousand years, searching for cultures
whose core technologies and languages bore clear similarities to those of the
ancient Caucasian cultures of Xinjiang. These he recognized as ancestral
societies. Slowly, patiently, he worked his way back through time and space,
tracing the territories of these ancestral groups. Eventually, after months of
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work, he sketched a map of what he concluded was their homeland. The
territory stretched in a wide swath across central Europe, from northern
Denmark to the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. But its heart, some six
thousand years ago, lay in what is now southern Germany, northeastern
Austria, and a portion of the Czech Republic. "I really felt that that fit the
archaeological evidence best," Mair later told me.
When he finally showed his map to some of his colleagues, though, they were
deeply dismayed. Elizabeth Barber, one of his closest collaborators, angrily
demanded that he redraw it, insisting that linguistic evidence, particularly
the ancestry of ancient words for looms, pointed to a homeland much farther
east. Realizing that he had gone too far for the comfort of his colleagues, and
that he had yet to find the proof he needed, he bowed to their pressure. He
redrew the map, placing the homeland in a broad arc stretching from eastern
Ukraine and southern Russia to western Kazakhstan. Then he published it in
the conference proceedings. "I thought, for this book, it wouldn't be too
bad," he confessed, shaking his head. "I decided I wouldn't go against the
flow that much, because that is a big flow with some really smart people."
Then he looked down at the map in front of him. "But in my own integrity and
honesty, I'd want to put it in here." He sketched a narrow oval. Its centre fell
near the Austrian city of Salzburg.
All of which brought us to Shanghai, and the rain, and the final arbiter,
hopefully, of more dna testing. Convinced he was right, and desperately
wanting to find the proof that would dispel all doubt, Mair believed genetics
still offered the best hope of vindication. If dna testing was sufficient to
convict or exonerate men in a court of law, it would surely be strong enough
to persuade even the most skeptical of his colleagues. He needed samples for
another, more powerful type of dna testing, but as he had just discovered,
the Chinese officials had upped the ante again. Japanese researchers had
recently paid $100,000 to acquire samples of the ancient matter for dna
testing, and officials at Shanghai's Museum of Natural History now wanted a
similar sum from Mair.
Mair didn't have it, and he was running out of time. Still, he remained
surprisingly upbeat. During a break in the negotiations one afternoon, he
invited me to follow Xu Yongqing, the head of the Shanghai Museum of
Natural History's anthropology department, down the stairs to a basement
room in the museum. Unlocking the door to a small room behind the
employees' bicycle racks, Xu led the way inside. Along three of the walls,
mummies in glass cases reclined luxuriously on red velvet cloth. Stacked
three high in spots, they looked much like train passengers bedded down for
the night in their berths. Mair stood quietly, scanning the room. Then he saw
what he wanted to show me. In one of the lower glass cases, a young woman
lay stretched out on her back, stripped of her fine woollens. Her knees were
pressed demurely together, her arms rested comfortably at her sides, and her
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breasts lay round and full, as if she had perished in the midst of nursing a
child.
But it was the hair that caught my attention. A long wavy golden-brown
mane twisted down her back. Standing in that room, I felt an unexpected
sense of kinship with her, surrounded as she was by strangers. And I
wondered just what had prodded her ancestors to exchange the cool
greenness of Europe for the scorching barrens of the Tarim Basin.
As always, mair had some ideas. He believed a new invention had spurred
this woman's forebears to embark on this eastern exodus: horseback riding.
Some 5,700 years ago, he explained, Eurasians had begun rounding up wild
horses, and sometime later they started sliding bits into their mouths and
swinging their bodies onto their backs. These seemingly simple acts led them
to conquer terrestrial space. For the first time ever, human beings were able
to travel swiftly over immense distances, an accomplishment so exhilarating
and adrenalin-charged that they suddenly gave full rein to their wanderlust.
So equipped, Mair went on with growing enthusiasm, early Europeans had
easily spread out across Eurasia, their brisk progress recorded in the ancient
campsites they left behind. Some of the invaders swept northward, becoming
the Germanic tribes; others journeyed west to become the Celts of the British
Isles. But the ancestors of the Xinjiang people had headed east across the
grassy steppes of Asia, repelling any who tried to bar their path, and four
thousand years ago, a small group of latecomers rode into the vacant river
valleys of the Tarim Basin. Finding sufficient land to make a life there, they
stayed, passing on their love and knowledge of fine horses to their
descendants. When mourners buried Cherchen Man, they arranged a dead
horse and a saddle atop his grave, two essential things he would need in the
next life.
In all likelihood, observed Mair, some of these European invaders rode even
further to the east and north, beyond the reach of desiccating deserts. And
there they brought with them such new Western inventions as the chariot, a
high-performance vehicle designed for warfare and sport, and bronze
metallurgy, which made strong weapons that retained their killing edge. Very
possibly, a few of these invaders carried with them the secret of writing.
While examining the hand of an ancient woman exhumed near Cherchen Man,
Mair had noticed row upon row of a strange tattoo along her hand. Shaped
like a backward S, it clearly resembled the early Phoenician consonant that
gave us our modern S. Mair has also found the identical form of S -- which
resembles an ancient Chinese character -- along with other alphabetiform
signs, on artifacts of this era from western China.
Chinese scholars, it occurred to me, were unlikely to take much comfort in
the thought of these invaders. And they were unlikely to be pleased by the
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pivotal role these intruders may have played in ancient Chinese life. Western
inventions, after all, shaped the course of history. Fleet chariots enabled
Chinese armies to vanquish their enemies, and sturdy bronze swords
reinforced dreams of empire. And a secret system of writing bequeathed
Chinese officials the means to govern the conquered lands effortlessly.
But invention is only one small part of the story. What societies make of
technological leaps forward is as important as the act of creation itself. It
was the genius of others, after all, who unwittingly made the West strong. It
gave Europeans the compasses that guided mariners overseas to Asia and
America. It provided the printing presses that disseminated knowledge of
these new lands to the masses. It bestowed the gunpowder that fuelled
conquest. Indeed, all these came from Chinese inventors.
There are many ironies joining East and West in the inseparable embrace of
history. Mair savours them. His trip to Shanghai in the rain ended in
disappointment. He left China empty-handed. But he is now raising funds and
fervently seeking permission to conduct further dna tests on the mummies of
Xinjiang. Until that day, Ur-David waits in a museum storage room in China,
unclaimed as a long- lost brother.
From the Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle
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From: http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Race&Groups-General/+Doc-Race&Groups-General-WhiteAchievement/MummySuggestsChinaWasProductOfWesternLearning.htm