China’s Mummies Looked European. Their DNA Didn’t

In 1988, mummies with high noses, reddish hair and felt hats with feathers went on display in western China, and the world called them Europeans. In 2021, geneticists read their genomes. Not one European ancestor turned up. Instead, the DNA led to a people from Ice Age Siberia that geneticists first discovered as a "ghost" in other populations' genomes, and whose trace lives on today in Europeans and Native Americans. In this video: the cemetery in the Taklamakan desert where the dead were buried in boats wrapped in cowhide, the 2010 DNA result that seemed to prove the European theory, why the 2021 genomes overturned it, the oldest cheese on Earth, and the blond-hair gene that reached Europe from Siberia. ⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 Europeans in the heart of China? 01:38 The cemetery that was lost for 60 years 03:10 The 2010 DNA "proof" 04:05 What the full genomes revealed 05:39 The ghost population of Ice Age Siberia 07:17 Did they really look European? 08:39 Isolated for thousands of years 09:29 Herders who couldn't drink milk 10:59 The Tocharian language puzzle 13:10 The blond-hair gene and you ▶ Watch next: Europeans, Chinese and Native Americans Have the Same Father    • Europeans, Chinese and Native Americans Ha...   📌 A note on the science Ancestry percentages (~72% Ancient North Eurasian, ~28% ancient Baikal-region ancestry) are statistical model estimates from Zhang et al. 2021. Pigmentation results come from low-coverage raw data in the study's supplementary tables; the authors themselves drew no conclusions about appearance, so treat them as signals, not proof. The language spoken by the Xiaohe people is unknown. Reddish hair in mummies can result from post-mortem pigment breakdown. Dates are approximate. 📚 SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES PMC-indexed (peer-reviewed): • Zhang F., Ning C., Scott A. et al. The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies. Nature 599, 256–261 (2021). PMCID: PMC8580821. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04052-7 • Li C. et al. Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age. BMC Biology 8:15 (2010). PMCID: PMC2838831 • Li C. et al. Analysis of ancient human mitochondrial DNA from the Xiaohe cemetery (2015). PMCID: PMC4495690 Peer-reviewed, not PMC-indexed: • Liu Y., Miao B., Li W. et al. Bronze Age cheese reveals human-Lactobacillus interactions over evolutionary history. Cell (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.08.008 • Kumar V. et al. Bronze and Iron Age population movements underlie Xinjiang population history. Science 376, 62–69 (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abk1534 • Zhang F., Gao S., Zhao X. et al. Bronze and Iron Age genomes reveal the integration of diverse ancestries in the Tarim Basin. Current Biology 35(15), 3759–3766 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.054 • Raghavan M. et al. Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans. Nature 505 (2014) • Guenther C. A. et al. A molecular basis for classic blond hair color in Europeans. Nature Genetics 46 (2014) Grey literature / background: • Mair V. Ancient Mummies of the Tarim Basin. Expedition (Penn Museum)