The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies

Razib Khans opinion about the Tarim mummies:

[h=1]The Tarim Mummies Were The Last Of The Paleo-Siberians[/h]The paper that reported on the data from the famous “Tarim Mummies” is out. If you don’t have a good grasp of the alphabet soup of ancient early Holocene populations, the results are going to be hard to parse. So I’ll make it simple for you: it now looks that the Tarim populations from 4,000 years ago are among the last people who were mostly “Ancestral North Eurasian” (ANE), and, they had no connection to populations in Europe. The second part is important because Victor Mair and others who have examined the mummies are wont to proclaim that the “Loulan Beauty” and her peers were “Caucasoid” due to their physical features. This may still be technically true, but the inference that this has to do with migration from the west of a European-origin population turns out to be false.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/10/27/the-tarim-mummies-were-the-last-of-the-paleo-siberians/
 
The Tarim Basin people are certainly not the Tocharians imo, going by the phenotypic list of the former's attributes, and I also have some doubts the Tocharians had anything to do with the Dzungarians.

We may have to look elsewhere for the Tocharians, and to a more recent time period, imo, as Dienekes always maintained, and which I always found plausible, although he was wrong in attributing the genetics of the Tarim Basin mummies to Iranian people from the west. These people were an ancient relict population, and nothing to do with movements from the steppe.

Ancient genetics has put a kaput to another trope of population genetics, or at least of "populist" population genetics.

Another thing seems highly probably to me: "R" y dna has its ultimate source in ancient Siberia.
 
Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006
 
Doggerland said:
Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006
Click to expand...

So some of the mummies probably had light hair(red and/or dark blonde) but brown eyes. How come other populations rich in ANE-ancestry turn out to be dark haired ? I think of EHG, CHG and Iran_N.
 
Doggerland said:
Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006
Click to expand...

By all means, let's look at the data in detail.

Perhaps you should take another look at rs1805006, bearing in mind that "cases with reads supporting the presence of derived alleles are marked by grey shades". So far as I can see, it's not so marked.

Also note that while rs1800404 on OCA2 is so marked, rs1800407 is not, and neither is
rs12913832
on HERC2.

As to rs1800404, it appears to be associated with skin lightening in East Asians, and it's present even in West Africans at a rate of 4%.
"
  • "rs1800404","15","25909368","TT" - OCA2 355*A, rs1800404 European=58% West African=4%
[PMID 17182896] Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East AsiansMol Biol Evol (2007) 24 (3): 710-722. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msl203http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/710.fullhttp://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/710/T1.expansion.htmlhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1800404"


rs1800407, even if it were so marked, which it isn't:
"rs1800407 is located in exon 13 of the OCA2 gene at amino acid position 419, and it is therefore also known as the R419Q variant. The (A) allele encodes the amino acid glutamine (instead of arginine), and it is associated with increased odds of having green/hazel eye color in some Caucasian populations. One copy of of rs1800407(A) is sufficient for this effect. [PMID 12163334, PMID 15889046; OMIM 203200.0012][PMID 18093281] According to tree scanning analysis, the proportion of eye colour variation explained by this nucleotide position is merely 4%. Thus, additional variation present in the OCA2 gene and perhaps some other pigment related genes must be taken into account in order to explain the high phenotypic variation in iris colour."

So, to claim these people possibly had hazel eyes wouldn't seem to be warranted according to the authors.

One sample having a snp associated with light hair is hardly a ringing endorsement for how fair these people were.

As the authors make clear, and I have always stressed, pigmentation is the result of the accumulation and depigmentation effect of many snps. ANE "might" have contributed a snp for lighter hair, which later in the SHG, for example, in combination with light eye and light skin snps could have resulted in the light haired and light eyed phenotype. That's a different story.

I'm not going to get into a further discussion of pigmentation because 1) I'm not that interested, and 2) people get emotional when it is pointed out that their support for such results is tenuous at best.

As to their physical features, they still look Amerindian to me, North American Amerindian, to be precise, with the what, almost 1/3 East Asian perhaps responsible.

The important news is that these people had no steppe in them. They are NOT the Tocharians.
 
About the skin:

rs1426654 GG dark
rs26722 CC fair
rs642742 CC fair
rs2424984 MISSING

Brown is likely.

About the eye color:

rs9782955 CC light/blue
rs1129038 TT dark
rs12906280 GG grey ring
rs4778241 AA dark
rs3935591 TT dark
rs1470608 TT dark
rs7403602 TC green/yellow
rs11638069 TT dark
rs2240203 TT light
rs7495174 GG dark
rs4779685 CC frecles
rs11634406 GG no frecles
rs3794604 CC light
rs7174027 GG light
rs11636232 CC dark

Brown to hazel is likely

EurogenesK36:

28.84 South_Central_Asian
18.04 Amerindian
17.84 Eastern_Euro
16.23 Siberian
13.54 Fennoscandian
5.38 Volga-Ural
0.12 South_Asian

23.00 South_Central_Asian
20.12 Eastern_Euro
9.62 North_Caucasian
9.21 Amerindian
8.60 Fennoscandian
7.62 Volga-Ural
5.54 North_Atlantic
5.45 North_Sea
0.01 South_Asian

29.96 South_Central_Asian
24.63 Amerindian
13.27 Eastern_Euro
9.36 Siberian
9.01 Volga-Ural
3.70 Fennoscandian
0.04 South_Asian
0.02 East_Central_Euro

ENA is free, Analysis tools are free too. If someone doesent like my interpretation, get the data yourself and interpret it.
 
^^I very politely pointed out your mistakes in terms of the data in the paper and the discussions of papers in snpedia. If you think you know better than all these scientists do in terms of which snps were under selection, and the major effect of each snp, and you don't think pigmentation is cumulative and one stray snp can determine appearance, be my guest.

It's still wrong.

There is definitely NO steppe in the Tarim Basin mummies studied here, no matter how you are interpreting K36. The proof is in the exhaustive statistics in the paper. I doubt even Eurogenes would claim that. Dzungarian samples are a different case. Sorry if that dashes your long held beliefs, but ancient dna is often a buzz kill for some people.
 
Razib Khan has chimed in. At least he has the grace to admit he was wrong.

"So I’ll make it simple for you: it now looks that the Tarim populations from 4,000 years ago are among the last people who were mostly “Ancestral North Eurasian” (ANE), and, they had no connection to populations in Europe. The second part is important because Victor Mair and others who have examined the mummies are wont to proclaim that the “Loulan Beauty” and her peers were “Caucasoid” due to their physical features. This may still be technically true, but the inference that this has to do with migration from the west of a European-origin population turns out to be false."

"This is clear because the Tarim population from 4,000 years ago didn’t have any gene flow from the eastern Yamnaya, the Afansievo, let alone the larger Corded Ware reflux to the steppe (Iranian people did move into the Tarim zone later; the languages of the southern rim of the basin in historic times were East Iranian, and Iranians seem to have arrived in the north in Mongolia late in the Bronze Age)."

As to the "White Buddhists": Not sure I'm totally on board with this, but plausible, I guess.
"The Chinese describe some of these people as having light hair and eyes. In other words, they looked like Europeans. Previous work had argued that this was due to the Tocharians being descended from European-like people. But we now have enough evidence from the Yamnaya to know that very few were pale-eyed or light-haired. Rather, they were a dark-haired and dark-eyed population with olive skin. Unless there was later natural selection for these characteristics, this isn’t due to the Afanasievo ancestry of the Tocharians (who by the period 500-1000 AD were mostly localized to the northeast of the modern Tarim basin, around Turfan). Rather, the Tocharians were themselves a mix of people, and I believe those with Europoid physical appearance had those because they were heavily Iranianized in ancestry.Today most people associate “Iranian” with Iran, and Persia, but Persians emerged on the southwestern frontier of the Iranian world, as heirs of Anshan and Elam (these were non-Indo-European societies). For much of history, Iranian-speaking people spanned the zone between Hungary and Mongolia and were much more physically and culturally diverse. To this day many Tajiks could pass for European, and these people have some of the highest fractions of “steppe herder” ancestry in the world. A minority of the Sintashta likely had blue eyes going by their genomes, so I think the origin of these “Europoid” people has to be interactions with the expanding Andronovo-horizon in the latter period of the Bronze Age.
These results in this paper show that the core population 4,000 years ago in the region of the Tarim that was later home to the Tocharians was inhabited by an ANE/Paleo-Siberian population, with a minority component of ancestry derived from northern East Asians. This ancestry dates to the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago. The later Tocharians probably absorbed these people, but I believe they were a mix of post-Afanasievo populations and Iranians. The former gave the Tocharians their unique and very basal Indo-European language, and the latter were responsible for “European” physical features so noted by the Han Chinese chroniclers in the 1st millennium A.D."
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021...-mummies-were-the-last-of-the-paleo-siberians


 
Hmm? I did nowhere say that they where steppe or whatever. I don’t think in those terminologies. I post the data and nothing more. Its the people that reading my posts fantasizing about their “Race” and so on. Like in the Natufian or Sumerian thread they read about a single trait and “freak out”

The alleles you posted may not play a so important role as you might think. There is also other evidence that some of the people had red hair from physical look and I only found indication for red in rs1805006 not the other red hair related SNPs. So it must be because of that SNP that you think doesn't play an important role.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies#Hair
 
Doggerland said:
How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006
Click to expand...

According to anthro data, Huge convex nose zone locates from EHG area to Altai bronze.
They seem to have a really large mouth:

Okunevo
inside_figurine_right.jpg



EuropoidMaskLopNurChina2000-1000BCE.jpg


china bronze
20080215-Sanxiongdui%20musem%20national%20Gallery%20of%20art.jpg
The Sanxingdui were contemporaries of the Shang that lived in a fertile
 
how do we know how the Xiaohe pastoralists are related to the inhabitants of the oasis city-states in the Tarim Basin dating to the 1st millenium BC ?
 
I have always thought there was a connection between Okunevo and EBA Bajkal.
Both were Q-L330 and I don't understand how else metallurgy would have reached the Bajkal area.
Maybe EBA Bajkal adopted some Tocharian-related language from Afanasievo.
If I understand correctly, Tarim Basin EMBA is a mix of EBA Bajkal and AG3? No, not likely if the gene pool is 9000 years old.
 
Last edited:
This is absolutely crazy. We had ANE (AG3) freakin mummies in front of our eyes this whole time and we had no idea.

Regardless of minutia the data is clear that this population was very West Eurasian, just as was AG3, MA-1, and Yana as well. From that we can conclude that they looked as such and the mummies reflect this as well.

Whether or not this complicates the PIE question, I'm not sure.

All of the males (R) associated with PIE came from Yana, right? All of the ANE males are derived from Yana as well. So we have a picture of a male line exploding from one population in paleolithic Siberia that eventually explodes again spreading IE languages, roughly speaking.

If you agree that this line of paleo populations were speaking some sort of proto-Indo-Uralic (or something like that....proto-proto-IE etc.) then perhaps you would have to conclude that the development of the IE languages may have in part differentiated through synthesis with people who were speaking a differentiated version of this proto-proto-IE, which may lend some credence to notions that forms of IE were already being spoken outside the pontic-steppe before the bronze age. This may be a reach, but seeing that ANE was just sitting there this whole time while having been paternally ancestral to consensus PIE males.....I dunno.
 
holderlin said:
This is absolutely crazy. We had ANE (AG3) freakin mummies in front of our eyes this whole time and we had no idea.

Regardless of minutia the data is clear that this population was very West Eurasian, just as was AG3, MA-1, and Yana as well. From that we can conclude that they looked as such and the mummies reflect this as well.

Whether or not this complicates the PIE question, I'm not sure.

All of the males (R) associated with PIE came from Yana, right? All of the ANE males are derived from Yana as well. So we have a picture of a male line exploding from one population in paleolithic Siberia that eventually explodes again spreading IE languages, roughly speaking.

If you agree that this line of paleo populations were speaking some sort of proto-Indo-Uralic (or something like that....proto-proto-IE etc.) then perhaps you would have to conclude that the development of the IE languages may have in part differentiated through synthesis with people who were speaking a differentiated version of this proto-proto-IE, which may lend some credence to notions that forms of IE were already being spoken outside the pontic-steppe before the bronze age. This may be a reach, but seeing that ANE was just sitting there this whole time while having been paternally ancestral to consensus PIE males.....I dunno.
Click to expand...

The paleolithic Siberia we know uptill now is P-P337 https://www.yfull.com/tree/P-P337/
but the PIE we know uptill know is the much younger sublcade R-M269 https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-M269/
 
Doggerland said:
Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006
Click to expand...


1 snp is not saying everything as angela said
but it still a very informative snp
for comparison i am rs12821256 TT ( dont even have one copy )
as you can see my hair is very dark brown

p.s
there is indeed huge chances this remain was blond hair since it carry 2 copies of the derived snp
 
bicicleur 2 said:
The paleolithic Siberia we know uptill now is P-P337 https://www.yfull.com/tree/P-P337/
but the PIE we know uptill know is the much younger sublcade R-M269 https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-M269/
Click to expand...

I haven't thought about this in awhile. Please forgive me.

Yana is ancestral to ANE (Ancient North Eurasian). ANE is ancestral to Bronze_Steppe. P-226 is ancestral to Q and R. PIE males consist of R1-M269 ancestors

Of course we have a common west Eurasian group (Villabruna) that shares a recent common ancestor with Yana that must have shared male lines with Yana (I and J had to be in there) that continued west without staying in Siberia and mixing with East Asian Ancestors. We don't see R1 in Europe until Villabruna (epigravettian) which is consistent with a Siberian (or otherwise east) origin of Q and R around 28k years ago which is exactly what their TMRCA is (28.7K and 28.2K years ago respectively). Then Europe is filled with R1 by around 10k years ago. So we can imagine perhaps a sort of cline of Common West Eurasian/Ancient North Siberian developing across North Eurasia through the Gravettian and into the epi-gravettian through drift->Admix processes. This is how you get EHG, ANE, and WSHG with the latter receiving additional East Asian Admixture. Normally you would think this is all so old that it could have nothing to do with IE whatsoever and I still officially hold that view.

But. Now we see this ANE population seemingly sitting there for 13k years right next door to consensus PIE development, essentially genetically unchanged. How much of their culture is conserved? How much was their language conserved compared to PIE super stratum populations like Samara HG? And who cares about language when you consider the ancient shared practices and mythology. This reveals itself with the Native Americans and their myth of the role of the dog through the passage into the afterlife which is identical to that of IE cultures.

There's just too much time in between all these populations for language continuity, but it's fun to think about and not impossible.

Side note. You see an fairly large Ami/Atayal signal in one of the Tarim_EMBA2 and we also see P in South and South East Asia. Pretty neat.

I'm getting used to circular admixture plots although I generally fear change. I keep looking for Blue WHG, Teal CHG, and Brown EEF.

http://[img]https://i.imgur.com/UdC6phP.jpg[/img]
 
I explained how blonde works in another thread. I explained that you can have brown eyes and blonde hair, if you have some of the light eye alleles and/or light skin alleles. It is dependent from other SNPs for lighter skin and/or eyes. There are light skin SNPs and light eye SNPs in the Tarim mummies, so dark blonde is possible in my opinion.
And yes, one SNP for blonde does not cause much if you are otherwise black skinned, dark brown eyed, but that is not the case for the people of Tarim.

And in many cases one SNP is enough to cause a phenotype, this is the truth for many red causing SNPs, if two alleles are present.

The experts are also claiming traits without having all relevant SNPs of a sample, or using algorithms to imputate trait related SNPs. Remember the Bronze Age Aegeans, who lacking some SNPs for skin color, and nevertheless they where described as dark skinned by the authors, based on a tool.
 
Doggerland said:


They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
Click to expand...


When I check the phenotype tab (J.) of the supplementary information, I see that all Tarim Basin samples probably carry EDAR except one (GMGM1) which cannot be determined, while only the Afanasievo-related AYIM22BN sample does not:
View attachment 12989
 
Doggerland said:
How they looked:

They hadbroad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.
Click to expand...

The tarim people has Botai-like admixture.
There is another skull of Botai admixture:
The DNA of two buried people from kurgans #67 and #67a of Aigyrzhal-2 site were revealed in arecently-published article on the genetics of Eneolithic and Bronze Age populations on the territoryof Southern and Central Asia. According to the results, these buried people were genetically linkedto the people of the Botai culture in Eneolithic of Kazakhstan (Narasimhan et al., 2019). But the physical type of the buried people from Aigyrzhal-2 site was not similar to the physical type of the ancient Botai people. This is another mystery that will require further research if it is to be solved.


"Picture 6. Aigyrzhal-2. The skull from burial mound number 67a.The Early Bronze Age. Photo by Y. Kitov."

images

Z

​
 
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