On another mail list I was asked to tell about the National Geographic
program which was on last night for those people who were not able to
get the NatGeo channel on their TV. Perhaps you might have missed it
also. Those who did watch it... please add any corrections or
additions to this.
Chinese "MYTHS" had told that tall, red-headed 'monkey-men' once lived
in the Tarim Basin desert of present-day Xinjiang, China, but that
they were not REAL men which were descended only from the original man
they called "Peking Man." The program IMPLIED that the Chinese
children had been taught in the past that they were not related to all
the other people in the world.
Apparently when these well preserved mummies were first discovered
many years ago, they were put away 'out of site and out of mind'
because they did not fit the chosen history of the Chinese people.
News of their existence has been accepted in recent years, and now the
government is allowing them to be studied.
They had already been dated to range in time from about 1800 BC to
about 200 AD. Some men were six feet tall with a slender face, and
definitely did not look like most Chinese of today.
A few surprising things had already been noted - Woolen garments were
ornate in the pattern of the weave and in the design of the plaid like
Europeans. There were bronze articles found that seemed to date to a
time prior to the use of bronze by the Chinese. A man from a later
period was buried with a saddle, which indicated they had
domesticated horses, and even a man from about 800 B.C wore a hat
adorned by seashells from the Indian Ocean a thousand miles to the
south.
The surgery to get DNA samples was interesting, but I was disappointed
they didn't give more information about the actual DNA findings.
Since this was for a general audience, I suppose a bunch of letters
and numbers would not have been interesting to most people. Of
course, the tests they were doing were more comprehensive than the few
junk markers on the Y chromosome being tested for the CARROLL surname
project. However, I did watch some of the diverse Haplogroups
drifting up the screen as they summarized with what turned out to be
the surprise.
According to the norms thus far developed, the DNA tests proved these
people were not just from Europe. There were indications that they
were a mixture of people from many areas, but especially from the area
of India in Southeast Asia. Traders from many places traveling
through that area thousands of years ago had left a lot of DNA
samples. You know, that is one trait of the human that hasn't changed
much!
Keep in mind the "Norms" being used for research such as this change
as more people are tested, but it seems that ancient people groups
moved around the earth much more than previously thought.
Lura
>>>>>>>>
---"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called
research, would it? " - Albert Einstein
>>>>>>>>
I like to see something in
print as I try to understand it, so this
morning I looked up some websites to help me digest what I saw last
night. If you are like me, you might want to check some of the
following.
Always a good place to start...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies
http://www.meshrep.com/PicOfDay/mummies/mummies.htm
http://www.s8int.com/page26.html
http://www.rense.com/general64/chui.htm
Bronze -
http://www.davidduke.com/general/caucasian-mummies-in-china-and-the-evolu...