EXCERPT
VICTOR MAIR: The clothes they were wearing are the clothes of the local people here in Kucha at the time, and it’s similar to Iranian clothes of that period.
JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: Oh, look! Look up there. You see the guy with the horse and the pointed hat?
VICTOR MAIR: Oh.
JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: There’s three of them on that horse. There’s three Saka there, with the pointed hats? Three Saka nomads.
NARRATOR: Many of the faces on the walls have Indian characteristics and caste marks. Others are plainly Europeans, painted in the style of classical Greece and Rome. There are also mounted warriors wearing trousers and boots, their bow cases slung over their saddles.
VICTOR MAIR: I would also like to point out the recurved bow in this individual kneeling up here. I think that’s fascinating. You see a hunting scene of a man with a recurved bow shooting.
NARRATOR: In the gloomy recesses of one of the caves, the scholars find a crucial clue to the identity of the Tocharians: not a painting, but script. Amazingly, the Tocharian tongue is more closely related to the languages of Western Europe—with their Indo-European origin—than to those of Asia. More than likely, the speaker of this Western tongue were of Western provenance themselves. The puzzle is coming together. Tartan textiles, European faces, shared ritual practices, and now a close affiliation with European languages. They belong to a people related to those who lived in eastern Europe in a region around the Urals and the Black Sea. Most of their common ancestors migrated west. The mummy people went east, through the Russian Steppes, to the Takla Makan. But how long did they survive here? Were the Tocharians in fact their descendants? There’s no way to be sure without seeing an authentic likeness of the Tocharians. The guide knows an isolated cave with portraits of the individuals who sponsored the cave building. It’s a dangerous climb, more than 100 feet above the valley floor.
JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: Isn’t that something? Up the ladders and across that ledge?
CHARLOTTE ROBERTS: Well, that was a bit of a climb! Do you think it was well worth it now you’ve seen the place?
VICTOR MAIR: Oh, well, I would say so. There are some pretty impressive features in this cave. In this vaulted ceiling above us, we have a lot of Buddhas with kneeling figures beside them. And the kneeling figures look like they’re Tocharians. So, he’s a local person, a Tocharian, but wearing elements of costume.
NARRATOR: In a small passage at the back of the cave, Victor hits pay dirt.
VICTOR MAIR: I see the red beard and the red hair parted in the middle. It’s a distinctive style of Tocharians. He’s wearing a coat with wide lapels on both sides, and then folded over. It’s a shame that these figures have all been defaced by people of other faiths at some time in the past. But still, it’s very easy to see what they looked like, and we can tell who they were.
NARRATOR: The Tocharian figures are strikingly similar to the mummies that lived in these parts 1,000 years earlier. Victor’s quest has come full circle.
VICTOR MAIR: And the wide lapel, folded back. He’s got the red beard, red hair parted in the middle. This one has blond hair and a long nose, and an Indian caste mark, which we call a tika. So, he’s a local person, a Tocharian, but wearing elements of costume that are Sassanian or Persian influenced. And he has an Indian caste mark, so we see it’s a culmination of various traits which the Tocharians have adopted. By about the 10th Century, the Tocharians had almost disappeared from the stage of history. We don’t find any more documents written in Tocharian, and also, we don’t have any references to them in historical texts after that period. I suspect that what happened to them is that they were primarily absorbed by the Turkish peoples who were moving into this area and replacing them. I believe that the legacy of the earliest inhabitants of the Tarim Basin survive in the current modern populations. We can sometimes see individuals with blond hair, with light eyes, very fair skin. And where did they come from? I think these are the vestiges of the ancient peoples. They now believe that they are Uyghurs, or Tajiks or some other group. But in my estimation, these are just carrying on the old Tocharian influence.
NARRATOR: A people long dead and neglected have emerged to reclaim their place in history, and radically change our view of a critical time. Inhabitants of the Takla Makan desert, ethnically European people, breached China’s fabled isolation 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. Laying the foundation for the Great Silk Road, the mummy people shaped the very future of civilization. The mummies are a unique and irreplaceable treasure. Though we now understand something of their role in history, scientific examination of their bodies will doubtless yield invaluable insights. But inadequate conservation imperils the mummies’ condition. No one knows how long before these ancient mortals disintegrate and crumble into dust, anonymous and evanescent as the drifting sands.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2502chinamum.html
The Taklamakan Mummies(Tocharian mummies)LINK 
In the late 1980's, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Taklamakan desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn't appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe.
Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of “Mummies of the Tarim Basin”, said:"Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story.”
A Tocharian man with red-blond hair; his clear European features still visible after nearly 3,500 years in his desert grave in Taklamakan. This mummified man was approximately 40 years old at the time of his death.