The Tarim Mummies: The Fair-Haired Dead of the Desert Who Came From Nowhere
In the far west of China lies the Taklamakan, one of the most pitiless deserts on earth — a vast basin of shifting sand ringed by mountains, whose very name is said to warn that those who enter do not come out. And yet buried in that killing sand, for thousands of years, lay a population of the dead so strange that their discovery overturned everything scholars thought they knew about the ancient history of the region. They are the Tarim mummies: hundreds of naturally preserved bodies, some of them more than three or four thousand years old, whose faces, hair, and clothing survived the ages so perfectly that they seem less like ancient corpses than like sleepers who might wake. And the great shock of them, the thing that has provoked argument for over a century, is that many of these bodies do not look like the people one would expect to find in the heart of Asia. They had fair or reddish hair, long noses, deep-set eyes, and features that strike many observers as European. In the midd...