The lost white tribe in Asia -- the Tocharians

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Looks like the lost  Indo-European White Tribe of the Tocharians were nearly wiped out by the Mongols-early Turks in the ancient world (300-900 AD).  Their mixed raced descendents are known as Uigyhrs...  which were later recruited by the Mongols to help invade Europe and Asia.  Initially Buddhist, they were converted to Islam later after 1000 A.D.  The beauty of the Xinjiang ladies is famous in China.  



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Lop Nur

October 3, 2011 in China, History | Tags: bomb, China, desert, Lake, Loulan, Lp Nur, mummies, Nuclear, site, Tarim, testing, Tocharian, Xinjiang | by Wayne | Leave a comment

The Tarim Basin

Tarim Lake was a salty lake which once covered more than 10,000 square kilometers (3,900 sq mi) in a dry region of Xinjiang, China.  The Lake was formed because the Tarim River and the Shule River both emptied into an endorheic basin–a landlocked area which prevents the outflow of any water. Since the time of the Yuan Dynasty the region has been called Lop Nur— a Mongolian name which apparently means something like "lake of many converging water sources".  The name has become ironic: because of climate change, deforestation, and a series of ill-conceived dams, Lop Nur is now an inhospitable desert with a few small seasonal salt ponds. The region is today an arid wasteland.

Ruins of Loulan City in Xinjiang

Lop Nur boasts a complex history stretching back to before the Bronze Age and the region has been the site of a number of fascinating but mysterious archaeological finds. A number of exceptionally preserved mummies (known as the Tarim mummies) which date from 1900 BC to 200 BC intrigue scholars because of their Caucasian features and DNA. These inhabitants of the Tarim Basin probably spoke Tocharian, the eastern-most known Indo-European language.  As history ebbed and flowed, the Tarim/Tocharian people became mixed with Uighurs, Kazaks, Kyrgyzs, and Han Chinese to form a vibrant culture.

A Tarim Mummy The mummy of a young woman nicknamed "The Beauty of Xiaohu", dating from about 1500-1800 BC

Lop Nur is thus the site of one of the great lost cities from Chinese history. During the time of the Han Dynasty, a large oasis town now known as the Loulan Ancient City flourished by the lake and grew rich from its position along the Silk Road.  But in the 7th century, due to a changing climate, the Loulan Ancient City vanished entirely destroyed by desertification, sandstorms, and other factors.   It is believed that the deforestation of the swampy poplar forests around the lake may have been an important factor contributing to the swift decline.  The region holds on to its treasures fiercely.  Numerous archaeologists and treasure hunters have been killed by the dunes, quicksands, and flash floods of the desert including noted archaelogist Peng Jiamu, who disappeared in 1980, and the explorer Yu Chunshun, who died there in 1996.  Because of its desolation and danger Lop Nar is also called the forbidden zone.

Satellite photo of Tarim Basin

There are other even more compelling reasons that the region has that name. The Red army uses parts of the desolate and unpopulated evaporite wasteland as a testing ground (much in the manner the US Defence department makes use of certain desert regions Nevada).  In 1964, Lop Nur was the site of the first successful thermonuclear fission test by the Peoples Republic of China, a project which was blandly codenamed "596″. Three years later in an exercise known as "Project Number 6" the Chinese military successfully tested a hydrogen bomb at the site thereby simultaneously demonstrating their power, scientific aplomb, and ability to craft boring secret names.

http://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/tag/tocharian/
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Tocharians - Who Were the Tocharians?

Definition:

Tocharians: An extinct Caucasian people who lived in China's Tarim Basin, in the Taklamakan Desert, from about 1800 BCE to 800 CE.

DNA tests on the famed Tarim Mummies show that these red-haired, blue-eyed people were most closely related to modern-day Ukrainians. The pattern and weave of their clothes resembles Scottish tartans.

"Tocharian" also is used to describe the two extinct Indo-European languages spoken by this people.

The word "Tocharian" comes from the Greek Tokharoi, which originally denoted a different Central Asian people that was mentioned by Strabo.
Pronunciation: toh-KAR-ee-uhn
Alternate Spellings: Tokharian
Examples:

"The Tocharians are not entirely gone; even today, some Uighers in the Tarim region have fair hair and blue eyes, evidence of Tocharian descent."


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Tocharians within the last 6,000 years?

From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China:

    Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present in Uygur (42.6%) and Uzbek (41.4%) samples, followed by Kazak (30.2%), Mongolian (14.3%), and Hui (6.7%).

The paper supports the idea that Uyghurs are an admixed population from Western and Eastern sources. But is this just an ancient cline of allele frequencies? In other words, are Uyghur lineage frequencies simply a function of their geographical position between East and West?




These are Y lineage frequencies. The Uyghurs look to be more than 50% "Western" here. This figure is from The Eurasian Heartland: A continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity.
Something else....
uyger3.jpg
This is from Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians. I've indicated which pie chart are the Uyghers, #30. These are the allele frequencies based on an SNP on SLC24A5 which confers light skin in Europeans. It is ancestral in both Africans & East Asians.
Finally....
uyger4.jpg
This is from Population differences of two coding SNPs in pigmentation-related genes SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. The Uyghurs are where you would expect for an admixed population.
The data from the skin color genes suggest to me that the Uyghurs weren't always there, and that they aren't a transitional population. The Uyghurs are a Turkic speaking people who settled within the Tarim Basin in the last few thousand years. Around 2,000 years ago the people who spoke the Uyghur dialect and identified as Uyghurs (or whatever proto-type tribe there existed as Uyghurs) were resident in Mongolia. Eventually these groups settled along the oases of the Silk Road, Kashgar, Turfan, Khotan and so on. But these cities were not uninhabited. Within them lived people who we know as Tocharians, of Indo-European speech and often exhibiting a phenotype associated with northern Europeans, fair of skin, eye and hair. The famous Tarim Mummies, which seem to be ancestral to the later Tocharians (i.e., many "look" European), can be dated as early as 1800 BCE. About 4,000 years before the present.
If you read this weblog you know I've been obsessing with the timing of selective sweeps on skin color genes. That is, at some point in the past all Europeans were fixed for the ancestral variant of SLC24A5, while today they are fixed for the derived. Preliminary work suggests that this new allele might have started rising in frequency very recently, perhaps just 6,000 years ago (though the range could push it up to 12,000 years before the present). Some scholars argue that the Tocharians are derived from the Afanasevo culture, which flourished between 5,500 and 4,500 years before the present in southern Siberia. Taking the extreme dates the selective sweep for SLC24A5 coincides with the migration south of the proto-Tocharians from their Siberian homeland. Could the derived allele have swept that fast across populations from the west? Did it sweep from Siberia to the west? Perhaps it was extant at low minor allele frequencies across central to western Eurasia and a mysterious simultaneous ecological pressure (a plague?) triggered a sweep across many populations.
So perhaps I am wishing to push back the sweep of SLC24A5 based on these rather tenuous archaeological conjectures. I bet the proto-Tocharians were fixed for SLC24A5 when they arrived on the scene, the earliest mummies are rather fair. Where are the alleles of the prior residents? I bet Inner Asia was barely populated, new agricultural techniques and domesticated animals were probably opening up huge swaths of land previously inhabited by very sparse groups of hunter-gathers. The Tocharians came with a culture which could support dense populations, ergo, the Turks who settled among them amalgamated, they did not supersede (at least genetically, the Turkish language of the Uyghurs is apparently intelligible with Turkish in Turkey).
Back to SLC24A5. Look at it barging across mountains all across Western Eurasia and into North Africa. And yet the derived form doesn't exist at very high frequencies in China. Why? Remember those hunter-gatherers before the Tocharians? I bet that their gene flow was very low. By the time the derived SLC24A5 SNP showed up on the North China plain it could be that another allele which did the same thing, or was good enough, was on the scene. The fitness of a new mutant is contingent upon the genetic landscape in which it resides. I've already referred to Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians. I don't think that could happen today. I also don't think it could have happened 2,000 years ago. Gene flow wasn't anything to shout about, but it was enough that I suspect a super-mutant like SLC24A5 (derived) would have shown up on the scene before something else bubbled out of the genetic background to upstage it.
After the end of the last Ice Age, but before the rise of "civilization," there was a period when isolated groups of humans took up farming. These populations expanded and launched a demic tidal wave in the local area, they simply swallowed up neighboring populations. They underwent lots of adaptive change because of new selective pressures, and perhaps because of magnification of instrinsic population genetic parameters. In short, during this formative period they were exploring their own adaptive landscapes, coming up with their own solutions to the problems that nature posed. By 2000 BCE this age of independent evolution was coming to an end. "Red haired folk" were on China's horizon to the west. 2,000 years later the eastward thrust would be countered, as the first of a long series of nomadic peoples from the east would swoop out of the Altai and ravage the plains of Europe and the Middle East.
In this post I mixed phylogenetics, models of adaptive evolution, results from genomics and the historical & archaeological record. Many of the pieces are very rickety, and I don't have great faith in the narrative that I'm presenting above. But, it's all proof of principle, the genomic era will usher in a new world of data and novel tools, and the reality that many of the questions asked are historical means that findings from more traditional fields can be brought to bear. It's a good time to be alive.
Note: There are 1,000 ways to spell "Uyghur." Do not persecute me for my choice.
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December 23rd, 2007 by Razib Khan in History

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ ... 000-years/


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The Wonderful Women of Xinjiang
2005-06-17

Here comes another spring.

The Xinjiang land that was not long ago battered by bitter cold is today ready to show off its charming landscape. A large part of that scenery is the town's women and their varied and colorful ethnic costumes.

Xinjiang is indeed known for its beautiful women. The Fragrant Concubine, one of Qing-Dynasty Emperor Qianlong's (1736-1795) favorites, was from here. Her charm (a characteristic renowned to be common to the women from the west region of China) and her special and very pleasant natural fragrance proved a romantic dream for many men. Still today her tomb in Kashi attracts numerous visitors, both from China and abroad.

In the sixteenth century, Amannisa Khan, queen of the Yarkand Khanate kingdom, collated and preserved the Uygur musical legacy, the Twelve Muqam. She carried out the task with great intelligence and care. She has, therefore, become a symbol of beauty and wisdom, as well as a model for Uygur women to follow.

Today the women of Xinjiang, no matter if from city or rural area, or from the Uygur, Kazak, Tajik, Khalkhas or other ethnic groups, are all part of a regional scene of beauty and charm. Young girls here, though typically a little shy and reserved, will often greet people with innocent and friendly smiles. Women here are not only beautiful, hospitable and well-versed in song and dance; they also reflect traditional virtues of diligence, with respect for their seniors and care for their juniors.

Working and living in a land where there is less hustle and bustle, compared to the more urban areas of China, many women in Xinjiang, nevertheless, also work hard, persistently pursuing their own goals. They are most satisfied when those objectives are fulfilled.

Aziguli Rouzi, Deputy Director of the Women's Federation of Kashi Area, is a Uygur woman cadre with 22 years of work experience. And she still becomes very animated when talking about her work. She feels fortunate to be a cadre from an ethnic group. She said, "The country's preferential policies toward cultivating and selecting cadres from ethnic groups have provided us many opportunities." Working on women's affairs for so many years, she has witnessed improvements of Uygur women's social status. "In the past, a Uygur girl was supposed to get married at the age of 13 or 14. And Uygur women used to be of low status both at home and in society. Now, things are different. Women's status has greatly improved, and girls have the opportunity to go to the college," she added.

Bielihan, a Kazak woman from a stock-raising village in Daheyanzi Town, Jinghe County, is talented at ethnic Kazak embroidery. With the opening of her home village to tourists in the 1990s, she became the first person who put her own handicrafts on the tourist market. At the same time, she planted cotton and raised cattle and goats on the contracted land. Her diligent work paid off. Her family became the first household in the village that had an annual income surpassing 60,000 yuan.

Rena, a particularly beautiful young woman from Uygur, has been in Beijing for four years. A runner-up at 2001 CCTV Model Contest, she is now a contract model with a Beijing-based model company. As a well-known model, she frequents important fashion release meetings, and serves as spokesperson for many well-known fashion brands.

Aziguli Rouzi, Bielihan and Rena are just three of an increasing number of modern Xinjiang women who are fulfilling their ideals - and exhibiting great beauty. They have inherited national traditions, while learning and accepting new knowledge.

Links

There are all total nine million women in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Since entering the 21st century, they have played an increasingly more important role in the political and economic life, even compared to recent decades, for instance, the 1990s.

Women's Participation in Government and Political Affairs in Xinjiang

Among the 16 prefectural and municipal leaderships in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, there are 18 female cadres in 15 leaderships. At the county level, the number increased to 85, and at the town level, it went up to 815. Since 1995, the number of female cadres has increased by four percent, an addition of 57,000.

Women's Employment in Xinjiang

In cities and towns, women account for more than 40 percent of the total employed population. The number of women working in the tertiary industry has increased to 47.1 percent from 37.6 percent in 1995.

Women's Education in Xinjiang

The nine-year education requirement has become compulsory in more than 60 counties of the 93 countries in the autonomous region. Female pupils and students account for more than 49 percent of the total.


http://np.china-embassy.org/eng/Culture/t200338.htm