Why did 4,000-year-old mummies from western China have such a striking “Western” appearance?

A 2021 DNA study published in Nature analyzed 13 ancient individuals from the Tarim Basin. Rather than being recent migrants from Europe or the western steppe, they formed a remarkably genetically isolated local population.

Their ancestry was modeled as approximately 72% Ancient North Eurasian and 28% ancient Northeast Asian, with no detectable Afanasievo steppe ancestry. The Ancient North Eurasian component represents a very old Siberian-related lineage that contributed ancestry to later populations across Eurasia and the Americas.

This means the unusual appearance of the Tarim mummies did not require them to be recent European settlers, as some earlier theories had proposed. Instead, they appear to have preserved ancestry from a deeply ancient population while remaining genetically isolated for a long period.

The famous mummy pictured here was not herself one of the 13 individuals sequenced; the study reveals the genetic origins of the early Tarim population to which these famous mummies belonged.

📚 Source: Zhang et al. (2021), The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies, Nature 599, 256–261.

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