TOUCHING EVIDENCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE

One of the researchers studying the origins of the ancient Caucasoid inhabitants of the Taklamakan Desert is Victor Mair, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. Gathering clues from the bodies themselves, the clothes they wear, and grave goods, as well as from linguistic studies and DNA research, he hopes eventually to be able to say where these people originated. Did they have a direct link to tlte Bronze Age cultures of Europe? Were they originally Steppe dwellers, horse-borne sheepherders driven by a nomadic way of life onto ever new frontiers?

The presence of horse remains and wheels in second-millennium graves near Qomul suggests a link to the Steppe of southern Russia, the Ukraine, and central Asia, where scientists believe the horse was domesticated and the wheel invented. By improving mobility, horse and wheel would have permitted the widespread dispersal of nomadic groups. A shred of evidence (below) found at Qaradowa also points to a possible European connection. It is a piece of plaid cloth, woven around 1200 BC from blue, white, and brown wool, probably on a warp-weighted loom; significantly, the weave is a twill, common then in northern Europe but not yet seen in textiles of the same period from China.

Wearing a mask to prevent contamination of ancient tissue with bis own DNA, Italian geneticist Paolo Francalaecigently removes a sample from the fully clothed, 3,000-year-old corpse of a boy of about two and a half. The body was found in a grave with that of a 20-year-old woman, most likely the child's mother. Ihe boy’s DNA— along with genetic material from other mummies—will be tested to see how it compares with the DNA of people living in the area today and with that of other ancient populations.

The bronze horse bit below from Hejing, site of a large cemetery in the mountains north of the Tak-lamakan Desert, dates to about 800 BC. One of several similar pieces found in graves there, in which horses or parts of horses were often interred, the find indicates that the animals were revered. D)e earliest-known horse burials occurred among the seminotnadic peoples of southern Russia, the Ukraine, and central Asia. Horse burials were later practiced in India and China.

Dating to about 1200 BC, the rem nants of a wheel uncovered at the village ofQgradbwd, near where the Taklamakan and Gobi Deserts meet, point to the use of horse and wagon as a mode of transportation. Similar wheels, also made from three pieces of pegged wood as early as 3000 BC, have been dug up on the Russian Steppe. These hint of a link between the peoples of the Steppe and the Taklamakan.