European Man Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb, Study Reveals

Human remains found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb belonged to a man of European origin, DNA evidence shows.

Chinese scientists who analyzed the DNA of the remains say the man, named Yu Hong, belonged to one of the oldest genetic groups from western Eurasia.

The tomb, in Taiyuan in central China, marks the easternmost spot where the ancient European lineage has been found (see China map).

"The [genetic group] to which Yu Hong belongs is the first west Eurasian special lineage that has been found in the central part of ancient China," said Zhou Hui, head of the DNA laboratory of the College of Life Science at Jilin University in Changchun, China.

Hui led the research, which will be published in the July 7 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The tomb containing Yu Hong's remains has been undergoing excavation since 1999.

The burial style and multicolor reliefs found in the tomb are characteristic of Central Asia at the time, experts say.

The people pictured in the reliefs, however, have European traits, such as straight noses and deep-set eyes.

"The mixture of different cultures made it difficult to confirm the origin of this couple, and the anthropologists also could not determine the race of these remains, owing to the partial missing skulls," Hui said.

To learn more about the history of the couple, Hui's team studied their mitochondrial DNA, a type of DNA inherited exclusively from the mother that can be analyzed to track human evolution.

The research shows that Yu Hong arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1,400 years ago and most probably married a local woman.

Carvings found in the tomb depict scenes from his life, showing him to have been a chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618).

The carvings suggest that his grandfather and father lived in northwest China's Xinjiang region and were nobles of the Yu country for which he is named.

Yu Hong died in A.D. 592, at the age of 59. His wife, who died in A.D. 598, was buried in the same grave.

Scientists are using DNA to reconstruct ancient population movements in Asia and to determine when Europeans arrived there.

"The existence of European lineages in China was already known to us, but these lineages are mainly concentrated in Xinjiang province," Hui said.

"In the central part of China, west-Eurasian lineages are seldom found in modern populations and have never been found in an ancient individual."

Austin Hughes is an expert in molecular evolution at the University of South Carolina.

The discovery in China, he said, "shows that there has always been gene flow between human populations."

"I think it's possible that these types of genetic studies can give a clearer picture of human movements and human gene flow," Hughes added.

The DNA studies can also shed light on marriage patterns, said Frederika Kaestle of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington.

"In many cases there are no other methods that allow us to gain access to information on geographic origin or relatedness of individuals in archaeological contexts," Kaestle said.

However, she added, it is impossible to draw conclusions about population movement into the region based on this one DNA sample.

"Was it just this one man [who moved into the area], or was it a large family including this man, or was it an even larger group of people from his ancestral population?" she asked.

Overall, she said, "the study of ancient mitochondrial DNA, as well as other genomic variations, holds great promise for enhancing our understanding of human prehistory."

"This is a nice example of how genetic and archaeological approaches can be combined fruitfully."

The Tocharians or Tusharas as known in Indian literature were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People’s Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BC to the end of the 1st millennium AD.

Their language is called Tocharian.

Archaeology
The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BC until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century AD.

“Tocharian donors”, possibly the “Knights with Long Swords” of Chinese accounts, depicted with light hair and light eye color and dressed in Sassanian style. 6th century AD fresco, Qizil, Tarim Basin. Graphical analysis reveals that the third donor from left is performing a Buddhist vitarka mudra. These frescoes are associated with annotations in Tocharian and Sanskrit made by their painters.There is evidence both from the mummies and Chinese writings that many of them had blonde or red hair and blue eyes, characteristics also found in present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Central Asia, due to the populations’ high genetic diversity. This suggests the possibility that they were part of an early migration of speakers of Indo-European languages that ended in what is now the Tarim Basin in western China. According to a controversial theory, early invasions by Turkic speakers may have pushed Tocharian speakers out of the Tarim Basin and into modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and northern India in the form of Kushans and the Tocharo-Iranic Hephthalites.

The Tarim Basin mummies (1800 BC) and the Tocharian texts and frescoes from the Tarim Basin (AD 800) have been found in the same general geographical area, and are both connected to an Indo-European origin. The faces on these frescos were usually vandalized in the past due to their European features. The mummies and the frescoes both point to White types with light eyes and hair color. There is no evidence that directly connects them however, as no texts were recovered from the grave sites.

A recent article (Hemphill and Mallory, 2004) reaches the following conclusions:

This study confirms the assertion of Han [1998] that the occupants of Alwighul and Krorän are not derived from proto-European steppe populations, but share closest affinities with Eastern Mediterranean populations. Further, the results demonstrate that such Eastern Mediterraneans may also be found at the urban centers of the Oxus civilization located in the north Bactrian oasis to the west. Affinities are especially close between Krorän, the latest of the Xinjiang samples, and Sapalli, the earliest of the Bactrian samples, while Alwighul and later samples from Bactria exhibit more distant phenetic affinities. This pattern may reflect a possible major shift in interregional contacts in Central Asia in the early centuries of the second millennium BC.
However, another theory states that the earliest Bronze Age settlers of the Tarim and Turpan basins originated from the steppelands and highlands immediately north of East Central Asia. These colonists were related to the Afanasievo culture which exploited both open steppelands and upland environments employing a mixed agricultural economy. The Afanasievo culture formed the eastern linguistic periphery of the Indo-European continuum of languages whose centre of expansion lay much farther to the west, north of the Black and Caspian seas. This periphery was ancestral to the historical Tocharian languages. See J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies — 2000 Thames and Hudson Ltd ISBN 0-500-05101-1.

LANGUAGE:

The Tocharians appear to have originally spoken two distinct languages of the Indo-European Tocharian family, an Eastern (”A”) form and a Western (”B”) form. According to some, only the Eastern (”A”) form can be properly called “Tocharian”, as the native name for the Western form is referred to as Kuchean (see below). Commonalities between the Tocharian languages and various other Indo-European language families (as with Germanic, Balto-Slavic, even Italic or Greek) have been suggested, but the evidence does not support any close relationship with any other family. The only consensus is that Tocharian was already far enough removed, at an early date, from the other eastern I-E proto-languages (Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-Iranian), not to share some of the common changes that PBS and PII share, such as early palatalization of velars.

Tocharian A of the eastern regions seems to have declined in use as a popular language or mother tongue faster than did Tocharian B of the west. Tocharian A speakers probably yielded their original language to Turkic languages of immigrating Turkic peoples, while Tocharian B speakers were more insulated from outside linguistic influences. It appears that Tocharian A ultimately became a liturgical language, no longer a living one, at the same time that Tocharian B was still widely spoken in daily life. Among the monasteries of the lands inhabited by Tocharian B speakers, Tocharian A seems to have been used in ritual alongside the Tocharian B of daily life.

Besides the religious Tocharian texts, the texts include monastery correspondence and accounts, commercial documents, caravan permits, medical and magical texts, and a love poem. Their manuscript fragments, of the 8th centuries, suggest that they were no longer either as nomadic or “barbarian (hu)” as the Chinese had considered them.

Tocharians in Indian Literature

Sanskrit literature in numerous instances refers to the Tocharians as Tusharas, Tukharas, Tokharas and Tuharas etc.

The Atharavaveda-Parishishta associates the Tusharas with the Sakas, Yavanas and the Bahlikas. It also juxtaposes the Kambojas with the Bahlikas. This shows the Tusharas probably were neighbors to the Shakas, Bahlikas, Yavanas and the Kambojas in Transoxian region.

The Rishikas are said to be same people as the Yuezhi

Tocharians.

That explains all the red-headed Jews. ;')

Research identifies accountant as descendant of Genghis Khan
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Tom Robinson had long wondered about his family tree. He never suspected its roots might lie in the Mongolian Steppe. The Florida accountant knew that his great, great-grandfather had come to the United States from England - but beyond that his research drew a blank. So he turned to the burgeoning field of "Bio-archaeology," having his DNA tested to see what it revealed about his origins. He was in for a surprise. According to a British geneticist who pioneered the research, Robinson appears to be a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, the Mongol warrior who conquered vast tracts of Asia and Europe in the 13th century.

It's twice as good as being an indirect descendant. ;')

Jews Assists Ancient Chinese to Make Earliest Paper Money: Expert
People's Daily Online
Friday, December 15, 2000
It is well known that "jiaozi," world's earliest paper money, originated in China some 800 years ago. But latest research indicate that Jews used to assist ancient China in doing this might surprise most people. "Jiaozi," also named "jiaochao," appeared in China in 1154 during the reign of the Jin regime (1115-1234). It was believed in the past that Jin regime hired coining workers of Song (960-1279), Jin's preceding dynasty, to make the paper notes. But Qiu Shiyu, researcher of the Harbin Academy of Sciences and expert of Jin history, concluded that Jews used to take part in the work of designing "jiaozi," based on his study of a copper printing plate left behind from the Jin regime. Made of coarse jute paper, "jiaozi" was too hard to be preserved and not a piece of such paper has been discovered so far. The copper printing plate used during the Zhenyou period (1213- 1217) of the Jin dynasty is kept in the Museum of the Chinese History now, has become the only proof to tell the identity of " jiaozi."

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