The Mummies of Urumchi (Hardcover) by Elizabeth Wayland Barber,Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (January 1999) Language: English ISBN: 0393045218
When the physical evidence of the various desicated corpses, cranial measurements, tatoos, is combined with their clothing, the only conclusion is that they were Celts. The scientrific problem is that we have no such complete physical remains from ancient Celtic culture to compare in Europe.
Thanks, I have the video and all the books.
I tend to agree with you about the Celts...Elizabeth Barber does and excellent job of comparing the Fabrics of the Tarim Mummies with the ancient Celts found in the salt mines at Hallstadt, Austria...5,000 miles and 1,000 years later.
However...
Going back 50,000 to 35,000 years ago (heart of the ice age) Europeans and Chinese are essentially the same group. Then they are separated ~ and became a bit different.
Still, during the ice age there was enough gene flow back and forth that 5% of European genetic background is of East Asian origin, and 5% of East Asian genetic background is of European origin.
Yes, the Russians are Indo-European ~ they speak Russian! That category is linguistic and cultural, not genetic.
There's a "split" in the East Asian populations dating back about 20,000 years ~ one group has tooth roots much like Europeans and Africans. The other group has some extra roots on some of their molar teeth ~ that group is made up of the Emeshi, Ainu, Jomon and, in modern terms, a large chunk of the Samurai.
There are also numerous genetic isolates ~ small groups of humans isolated from all the others for thousands of years, and in the North there are the Sa'ami. They were the first people to break out of the Western European refugia near the end of the Ice Age ~ they count as genetic isolates but are certainly as widespread as were the Emeshi/Aimu/Jomon, both of whom actually reached the Americas as early as 24,000 years ago.
Until recently anthropoligists believed that the Sa'ami were a variety of East Asian, and that the Emeshi/Ainu/Jomon were a variety of European.
Both conclusions were erroneous according to genetic analysis.
One group of Sa'ami appear to have mixed things up with a different group of humans about 7,000 years ago who may have come from the Near-East, but not from East Asia or Europe. Current archaeological research taking place in Pakistan and Iran is revealing the existence of a very early "civiliation" that worked its way from the Indian subcontinent to Mesopotamia about that time ~ my wildest guess is these are the ancestors of the Sumerians who invented writing. Protypical pictoglyphs come into existence in one of the ancient Sa'ami core areas in Keralia (Russia and Finland) at about the same time. More work is needed, but keep your eyes open.
A little note on that connection, there's a school of philology that holds that the Sumerian language was drived from the Dravidian languages in East India and what is now the Malaysian peninsula. These same philologists link the modern Sa'ami languages to ancient Sumerian and NOT to far more recent Uralic-Altaic and Finno-Ugrian languages. In fact, they argue that the Sa'ami languages served as the base for most of the Finno-Ugrian sub-group ~ not the other way around. There are some grammatical peculiarities that demonstrate the case (according to the philologists) ~ one such peculiarity appears in inflected Germanic languages.
So, where did all the blue-eyed blonds come from? Well, that's pretty recent. Seems that human beings with pigmented skin can't make enough Vitamin D to survive in higher latitudes unless they have a reliable year round external source. Cattle play the part up to about 30 degrees North. From that point on you need oily fish ~ readily available in the seas surrounding the European peninsula, but rare in the Taiga and Tundra of Siberia. Even then, you need all the Vitamin D you can produce, so heavy pigmentation is quickly selected against and disappears in any European Far Northern population.
In East Asia the settlements in the Far North are of much more recent origin. Today's Aleuts and Eskimo can obtain vitamin D from many outside sources!
In the long run, though, given a few Dark Ages here and there, and population crashes, and the Eskimo will turn blond ~ and all of them will have blue eyes ~ just like the Huskies.