Catching up on your last few posts here:
Thanks for the info on those two mummy books! Looks very interesting--I definitely want to read those. I see the Barber books argues for a relationship with the Celts, which would be very relevant to what we're discussing.
Thanks also for the link on Otzi's tattoos. That gives me some idea of where the tattoos were. I've done some research on the history of Chinese medicine recently and my take on it is that certain elements of acupuncture could arise independently in different cultures by virtue of physiological commonality (for instance you can discover a lot of pressure points by self-observation of common bodily functions), but the specifically Chinese acupunctural theory and method seems to have been influenced by East-West cultural exchange between Greece and India (i.e. the Greek theory of the four bodily humors, which has parallels in Indian and Chinese theory) around the time of Alexander the Great and perhaps earlier; however (if I remember right) I believe there are archaeological finds in China indicating acupunctural practices which predate the rise of the classical Chinese acupunctural method, so there may well have been an earlier tradition perhaps sharing a common ancestor with Otzi's--perhaps derived from steppe shamanism's medical practices, I would venture to guess. I guess to tell whether a given case reflects specifically Chinese influence/kinship it would be necessary to isolate some elements specifically characteristic of the Chinese method and compare a given case with those. Likewise on yoga--certain postures could probably arise independently, but it depends on the specifics. I'd have to do more research to reach a firm opinion on whether those Olmec statues are specifically Yoga-like enough to constitute an argument for contact with India. I have a friend who's a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I'll forward him the picture and see what he thinks of it.
I hadn't heard the thing about Otzi's copper axe pushing back the Copper Age, which is also interesting. This reminds me that there are some problems with radiocarbon dating in that area/period due to the Thera eruption (some stuff on this at the bottom of http://devlab.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/chrono.html : "A major debate has been raging since 1987 over the absolute date of the great volcanic explosion of the island of Thera/Santorini early in the Late Bronze Age. As a result, absolute dates within the first two-thirds of the second millennium B.C. (ca. 2000-1350 B.C.) are presently in an unusually active state of flux.").
Yup, Victor Mair recruited Barber and her husband to go to China with him and do the 'textile' work. She said that the fabrics (textiles) were just like those at the Celtic site at Halstadt, Austria...same materials, same mfg technique, same weave and same pattern style. Some of the patterns are still in use in Scotland today.
Urumchi and Haldstadt are 4,000 miles and 1,000 years apart. Those two books are amazing. I've read each three times and still haven't absorbed all the info.
It was 1628BC...The same time as the Bibical Exodus.
Professor Mike Baillie (dendrochronologist) does an excellent job of dating that eruption by used tree-rings worldwide in his excellent book, Exodus To Arthur