Buried in boat coffins in an otherwise barren desert, the Tarim Basin mummies have long puzzled scientists and inspired numerous theories as to their enigmatic origins.
Since the late 1990s, the discovery of hundreds of naturally mummified human remains dating from around 2,000 BC to AD 200 in the region’s Tarim Basin has attracted international attention over their so-called ‘Western’ physical appearance, their felted and woven woollen clothing, and their agro-pastoral economy.
The Tarim Basin mummies’ cattle-focused economy and unusual physical appearance had led some scholars to speculate that they were the descendants of migrating Yamnaya herders, a highly mobile Bronze Age society from the steppes of the Black Sea region of southern Russia. Others have placed their origins among the Central Asian desert oasis cultures of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), a group with strong genetic ties to early farmers on the Iranian Plateau.
To better understand the origin of the Tarim Basin mummies’ founding population and who first settled the region at sites such as Xiaohe and Gumugou circa 2,000 BC, a multi-national team generated and analysed genome-wide data from thirteen of the earliest known Tarim Basin mummies, dating to circa 2,100 to 1,700 BC, together with five individuals dating to circa 3,000 to 2,800 BC in the neighbouring Dzungarian Basin. This is the first genomic-scale study of prehistoric populations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and it includes the earliest yet discovered human remains from the region.
The Tarim Basin mummies were not newcomers to the region
To their great surprise, the researchers found that the Tarim Basin mummies were not newcomers to the region at all, but rather appear to be direct descendants of a once widespread Pleistocene population that had largely disappeared by the end of the last Ice Age. This population, known as the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), survives only fractionally in the genomes of present-day populations, with Indigenous populations