Ancient mummies uncovered in Central Asia were virtually inaccessible to the West until a Penn professor with a fine sense of timing and a passion for the past overcame Chinese reticence and political fears. Mummies, always a crowd-pleaser in any museum, were a crowd-pleaser in China, too, where they went on display in museums in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region beginning in 1987.
The first time Mair saw the mummies, he was "thunderstruck." The 3,000- to 4,000-year-old mummies "looked so lifelike. I had a hard time believing they were dead that long. The faces pretty much were the way they looked in life. They retained their original skin color. Quite a few were fair, with blond, light brown and reddish hair."
The mummies were recovered in the Taklamakan desert -- the second-largest desert in the world. Its arid climate, with extreme summer heat and extreme winter cold, aided by the highly saline soil in some areas, was ideal and preserved the mummies, their clothes and burial objects.
. . . The earliest group of mummies, dating from 2000 to 1000 B.C., were not simply Caucasoid. Mair believes they are the ancestors of the Tocharians, a group that spoke an Indo-European language related to Celtic languages and to Hittite, the oldest known Indo-European language, from Anatolia or modern Turkey
Perhaps not Celtic but the The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber decisively identifies their clothing as very similar to Celtic weaves.
Jacob, you've let your history/archaeology/anthropology slip horribly out of date. They are finding Celtic (Proto-Celtic) influence all the way to Beijing. Also, Read Victor Mair's book The Tarim Mummies
The Curse Of The Red-Headed Mummy
Fedora, I wonder if these are the Hakka we were talking about last night? Remember that I said during the drought that the people who went toward Europe were the Schytians and those who went in the opposite direction were Hakka, Han, Hun and Saka.
Barber and Goode said the fabrics found with the mummies (In the Urumchi area) compare exactly with the fabrics from the famous Celtic sites at Hallstadt, Austria. They are alike in style, material and Manufacturing technique although they are 1,000 years and 4,000 miles apart in time/distance.
The oldest paper ever found came from this site and the extinct (Indo-European) Tocharian language was written on it. Tocharian is most similar to Celtic than other Indo-European languages.