LINGUIST List 5.319

Mon 21 Mar 1994

Disc: Indo-Europeans in Ancient China?

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1. Rudy Troike, Why doesn't anyone mention the Tocharians?

 Date: Mon, 21 Mar 1994 10:30:20 -0500
 From: "Juris G. Lidaka" <LIDAKAWVSVAX.WVNET.EDU>
 Subject: Caucasians in ancient Chine--LONG x-post

WARNING--this LONG article is being x-posted to Ansaxnet & HEL-L.
 expect duplication if you are on both!
 From _The Columbus Dispatch_ Sunday, March 13, 1994, typed
up by tired-fingered Juris. Anybody want to make an argument about
Indo-European Tocharian being in the neighborhood? Who's got a map
that places Tocharian A & B and that will show their chronological
& geographical proximity to these folks?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 Caucasian Bodies Mystify Chinese
 4,000-Year-Old Corpses Get DNA Tests
 by Keay Davidson
 San Francisco Examiner

San Francisco--In dim light they appear to be sleeping, but they've
been dead up to 4,000 years: more than 100 astoundingly well-
preserved corpses unearthed in a Chinese desert, whose inexplicably
blond hair and white skin could topple dogmas about early human
history.
 A former Stanford scientist is analyzing the corpses' DNA
in hopes of answering haunting questions: Who are they? Where did
they come from? And what on earth were these European-looking men,
women and children doing in China's parched out-back 2,000 years
before Jesus, when Europe was largely a dark forest?
 Sixteen years after the first corpses were found, the
Chinese government has granted Western researchers their first
close look at these faces from prehistory: a baby in colorful
swaddling clothes; a 20-year-old girl with braided hair, found
buried in a fetal position with her hands by her chest, as
if dozing; a man with a pigtail, scarlet-colored clothes and
red, blue and amber leg wrappings, who looks as relaxed as if
he were posing for a Benetton ad.
 The discovery--which could have far greater impact on
our understanding of societal evolution than the lone, ancient
"ice man" uncovered in the Alps in 1991--is described in an
article by science writer Evan Hadingham in the April issue of
_Discover_ magazine. Based on the _Discover_ article and _San
Francisco Examiner_ interviews with experts on genetics and
Chinese history and culture, here's how the discoveries unfolded.
 In 1978 and 1979, Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua
found the first of what would prove to be more than 100 corpses
in Xinjiang Province. They had white skin, blond hair, long
noses and skulls, and deep-set eyes--Caucasians, perhaps from
Northern Europe.

 Little Attention in the West
 Only scanty press reports have reached the West, at least
partly because of the region's isolation, Chinese bureaucratic
inertia and the regime's suppression of foreign contacts, particu-
larly after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
 Now the cloud of mystery is lifting thanks to an investiga-
tion organized by University of Pennsylvania China scholar Victor
Mair, in collaboration with researchers in China, the United States
and Italy. The collaboration required delicate negotiations with
Chinese officials.
 In would have been "absolutely unthinkable" for Chinese
authorities to grant Westerners such access--including tissue
samples from the corpses--only five years ago, Mair told _The Examiner_.
 "In the 1910s and 1920s, it was a game of the imperialist
(Western) archaeologists to go in and take away important stuff--
ancient manuscripts, artworks, paintings, statues ... (Chinese
officials are) very sensitive to that and they don't want to make
the same situation reoccur," Mair said.
 He also speculates that some Chinese officials may have
initially hesitated to ballyhoo the find because they didn't know
what to make of all those Caucasian faces. They date from a time
when, according to regional histories and national pride, China
was advancing--developing writing and metal artifacts and wheeled
vehicles--without help from foreign meddlers.

 Bodies' Condition Excellent
 The corpses were unearthed at scattered burial sites in an
approximately 500-mile-wide region of northwest China, between the
so-called Celestial (Tian Shan) Mountains and the Taklimakan Desert.
They range in age from 2000 B.C. to 300 B.C., based largely on
radiocarbon dating.
 Where do they come from? At the University of Sassari in
Italy, anthropological geneticist Paolo Francalacci--who worked at
Stanford until recently--hopes to determine the corpses' likely
place of origin by comparing their CNA, or genetic material, with
modern DNA from different societies.
 "It will take time before we know anything (from the DNA
analysis)," cautions Francalacci's Stanford colleague, Luigi Luca
Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist. "It's a very tricky
type of analysis. Old DNA is generally very damaged.
 "What I find most surprising of all is that these cadavers
were in such perfect condition," Cavalli-Sforza said. Their Euro-
pean-looking features are "sufficient, I think, to say these people
came from Northern Europe. ... My guess is that these (people) were
kind of 'scouts' (who) were, most probably, traveling east and
maybe settled there (in Xinjiang)." He believes thousands of corpses
may yet be found.
 Why has it taken so long for the news to get Western scholars'
attention? While Western news media trumpeted the 5,000-year-old
"ice man" found in the Austrian and Italian Alps, they have ignored
the Chinese find--almost.
 For example, in 1981 a UPI story entitled "Chinese Find
Blonde Mummy" appeared on page D-2 of the _Albuquerque Journal_;
in 1986 the Associated Press passed on a brief report from the
New China News Agency that archaeologists had found 50 corpses
preserved for at least 3,000 years, some of which wore "beautiful
designs in bright colors"; and in December 1993 the _Chicago
Tribune_ cited speculations that corpses in an ancient city along
the Silk Road--the route that has traditionally linked the Medi-
terranean to China--indicated it "may have been inhabited by drop-
outs from Alexander the Great's army" in the 4th century B.C.
(In fact, the corpses are up to 1,500 years older than that.)
 Some corpses were displayed in Chinese museums, and one--
dubbed the Beauty of Loulan--travelled all the way to Japan,
where "she" was publicly exhibited in a few cities in 1993.
 So why haven't Western scholars gone mad with excitement?
Poor Chinese public relations could be partly to blame. Mair
suspects that in the late 1970s, Chinese scholars were so startled
by the Caucasian corpses that they weren't sure what to do with
them.
 "I think it flummoxed them when they found these Caucasian
people out there ... it's not what they expected," he said. "They
didn't know how to put it into any of their schemes for history;
it just didn't make sense to them.
 "I wouldn't say they were deliberately covering this up,
(although) there are to this day some extreme (Chinese) conserva-
tives--politicians or some scholars--who wish those (corpses)
weren't there."

 Nagging Questions
 In 1987, Mair happened to be touring China when he entered a
museum in Urumqi that displayed corpses of a man, woman and child--
a family, as it appeared. They had died 3,000 years earlier, "yet
the bodies looked as if they were buried yesterday," he said.
 What left him "thunderstruck," though, was their faces:
They were Caucasians, apparently of European origin. "The questions
kept nagging at me: Who were these people? How did they get out here
at such an early date?"
 The April issue of _Discover_ includes a gallery of color
photos of the corpses. They include a man with a painted image of the
sun--a religious symbol?--on the temple of his head; the baby in
swaddling clothes, its eyes covered with stones--a burial ritual?;
a woman in a tall, peaked hat reminiscent of a witch's hat, and a
woman wearing a fur-lined coat, leather mittens and a two-pointed
hat that, according to Chinese archaeologists, indicates she might
have had two husbands--a possible result of a shortage of females.
 They were buried in simple graves, roughly 6 feet deep, with
mats at the bottom. Some graves contain artifacts hinting that the
living mourned the dead: For example, a baby was buried with a sort
of milk bottle fashioned from a sheep's breast.
 "This is my favorite story that we've done in the seven years
that I've edited _Discover_ ... because we were able to publish some-
thing monumental before anyone else," said the magazine's editor,
Paul Hoffman.
 Traditionally, Chinese historians insist that their society
evolved on its own with little foreign input. That view has played
well in modern China, which resents its past subjugation to
foreign imperialists.
 But Mair says the traditional view is hard to reconcile with
the discovery of so many Caucasians who lived in what is now the
westernmost edge of China, thousands of years before Marco Polo.
 "The archaeological, linguistic, and textual evidence forces
me to conclude that China has both significantly influenced and been
influenced by other civilizations throughout history and, indeed,
prehistory," Mair said.
 The preliminary research has been funded by the Sloan
Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.
 Known for tackling unorthodox topics, Mair specializes in
early Chinese languages and literature, about which he has written
several books. "He has a very strong reputation among his colleagues,"
said sinologist Professor Tsu-Lin Mei of Cornell.
 "I suppose one of the main reasons no other sinologists have
made any effort to understand the importance of these corpses is
because [sic] the subject is intrinsically controversial. I, on the
other hand, am not only unafraid of controversy, but seem to thrive
on it," Mair said. "I believe that the only way to make major advances
in any endeavor is by taking risks--the bigger the risk, the
greater the advance."