For alot of you this is old news, but I never really knew much about this until I watched a program about the Caucasian Tarim mummies on the National Geographic channel the other day. So I thought I would post this in the OV so that our visitors and East Asian friends can see that Europoid/Caucasians many of whom had blonde or red hair and were wearing plaid...were the first human beings to inhabit the western Xinjiang region of modern China, the oldest of the Caucasian mummies dates back about 4,000 years!:eek: The oldest mummies were purely Caucasian and the later mummies showed signs of East Asian admixture:rolleyes:     Here is a couple articles about it...   http://uyghuramerican.org/articles/4...c-mummies.html     Solid as a warrior of the Caledonii tribe, the man's hair is reddish brown flecked with grey, framing high cheekbones, a long nose, full lips and a ginger beard. When he lived three thousand years ago, he stood six feet tall, and was buried wearing a red twill tunic and tartan leggings. He looks like a Bronze Age European. In fact, he's every inch a Celt. Even his DNA says so.      The burial sites of Cherchen Man and his fellow people were marked with stone structures that look like dolmens from Britain, ringed by round-faced, Celtic figures, or standing stones. Among their icons were figures reminiscent of the sheela-na-gigs, wild females who flaunted their bodies and can still be found in mediaeval churches in Britain. A female mummy wears a long, conical hat which has to be a witch or a wizard's hat. Or a druid's, perhaps? The wooden combs they used to fan their tresses are familiar to students of ancient Celtic art.   At their peak, around 300BC, the influence of the Celts stretched from Ireland in the west to the south of Spain and across to Italy's Po Valley, and probably extended to parts of Poland and Ukraine and the central plain of Turkey in the east. These mummies seem to suggest, however, that the Celts penetrated well into central Asia, nearly making it as far as Tibet.   http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/lofi...p/t146001.html   URUMQI, China (AFP) - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that  Caucasians roamed China's Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived .     China has only allowed the genetic studies in the last few years, with a 2004 study carried out by Jilin University also  finding that the mummies' DNA had Europoid genes,   further proving that the earliest settlers of Western China were not East Asians .   http://www.meshrep.com/PicOfDay/mummies/goldilocks1.jpg