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00:04Ancient mummies surface on a desert in Western China.
00:11Their deep eyes, thin lips, and blond hair amaze Chinese archaeologists.
00:20They look European.
00:25The discovery of these Caucasian mummies defies history as we know it.
00:31Where did they come from? Why did they move into China?
00:36And what fate led them to vanish into the desert air?
00:43Scientists journey to the edge of recorded history as they pursue the desert mummies of China.
01:04Housed in a museum in Western China are beings whose existence, until now, was impossible to explain.
01:15The bodies are so fragile, permission to film them has been denied until this day.
01:25As experts conduct routine conservation work, a remote control camera is deployed to film these treasures from every angle.
01:39One look at the individual under the shroud reveals a central mystery.
01:48His face is Caucasian, yet many centuries ago he died in China.
01:59His remains were discovered in Xinjiang province.
02:04Xinjiang is so vast it could swallow Texas two times over.
02:11Mountains as high as the Rockies spill down to desert depressions 500 feet below sea level.
02:22For centuries Xinjiang's wide open spaces have attracted mysterious strangers, exotic cultures and religious beliefs.
02:39Islamic peoples called Uyghurs moved into the region from Mongolia in the 8th century AD.
02:51Today they co-exist with ethnic Chinese in this land of extremes.
03:04Like a giant furnace, the Taklamakan desert rests in the Tarim Basin at the base of Xinjiang.
03:13In the span of a day, temperatures can soar from 20 degrees to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
03:23The name Taklamakan means go in and you won't come out.
03:34Marco Polo passed through Xinjiang in the 13th century and wrote that the land seemed infested by phantoms.
03:43History would prove him right.
03:48In the early 20th century, British explorers stumbled upon an enigma.
03:57A young man was discovered enclosed in a crude coffin.
04:02His costume was non-Asian.
04:06The features of his ancient face seemed European.
04:12The team dismissed their discovery as unexplainable.
04:18As far as they knew, the earliest interaction between China and the West had nothing to do with mummies and
04:24everything to do with silk.
04:32In the second century before the birth of Christ, the Chinese created a trade highway called the Silk Road.
04:42Caravans laden with silk crossed Xinjiang, protected by a series of fortified outposts.
04:51The fabric was destined for the streets of Europe where it was almost worth its weight in gold.
04:59In the 1960s, Chinese archaeologists excavated Silk Road sites.
05:05A shocking discovery awaited them.
05:09Near the fortress called Gaochang, new mummies emerged.
05:13This time, the bodies were Asian.
05:23Indeed, a mysterious process of human preservation was at work in the desert.
05:41The footprints of this Asian woman are clear to the naked eye.
05:48A clue to her death was the shape of her abdomen.
05:56This body that we are looking at is 1200 years old.
06:00This woman is from the Tang Dynasty and apparently she died in labor.
06:06It must have been an agonizing death from the look on her face and her hands.
06:13It was amazing seeing this body appearing before our eyes.
06:18But then, as our work progressed, we started to find more mummies in other areas of Xinjiang and they were
06:25a lot older.
06:30The discovery of Asian mummies was so encouraging, Wang Binghua was eager to explore other Silk Road sites.
06:41The last thing on his mind were the early British reports of Caucasian mummies.
06:46The idea that Westerners had lived in ancient China just seemed too fantastic.
06:55For now, the discovery and excavation of Silk Road settlements would be difficult enough,
07:00especially when the immense area of Xinjiang was considered.
07:04The Taklimakan Desert alone covers an area of 125,000 square miles.
07:18Huang Binghua's monumental survey was brought to the attention of Western archaeologists
07:23by Victor Mayer of the University of Pennsylvania.
07:27People obviously couldn't live in the dryness of this desert, this huge desert, but they did live all the way
07:33around in these oases,
07:34between the mountains and the desert.
07:42Oases are born in Xinjiang's mountains.
07:48Fields of melting snow feed a network of desert rivers.
07:54So vital as every drop, an 1800-mile system of underground channels was developed.
08:03called the Kares, it was built centuries ago to prevent evaporation.
08:11The identity of the original designers of this ingenious system is unknown,
08:16but surely ancient peoples flocked to river-fed oases like this one in Turpan.
08:26Even the smallest clue to Xinjiang's earliest occupation was worth more to Wang Binghua than all the precious waters of
08:34the Kares.
08:37From oasis to oasis, villagers were asked if they had ever heard stories of ancient burials.
08:46The professor was advised to look along the rim of the great Gobi Desert.
08:57In Xinjiang, it is a treeless, barren expanse.
09:04Yet beneath the Gobi's rocky crust, Wang Binghua made the discovery of his life.
09:11It happened in Wupu, a pristine desert town forgotten by time.
09:35The residents here love a good story, and the professor's search for mummies was a whopper.
09:43Huang Binghua was welcomed to hunt for burial sites wherever he pleased.
09:51In 1979, on the outskirts of Wupu, Wang's team excavated a shallow depression covered with strange pottery fragments.
09:59The
10:00It's because it's too dry, it's too dry.
10:03It's too dry.
10:24Layers of ancient logs and thatching were removed.
10:34If this was a burial, it was like none they had ever seen.
10:41Pottery of unknown origin emerged.
10:48And then came the phantom, the mummified corpse of a middle-aged man.
10:54Many of these early finds were wracked by decay, possibly because their graves were disturbed centuries ago.
11:04What mattered were the skulls.
11:06The low and wide facial dimensions and strongly projecting nasal openings proved they were Caucasian.
11:15Experts now hope that hidden in these shallow graves were answers to a bottomless mystery.
11:21Who were these people?
11:29The mummies found in Wupu, China gave researchers tantalizing hints of European origins.
11:45Wupu woman died at the age of twenty.
11:48She was the first of a series of well-preserved mummies.
11:53Her light-colored Caucasian hair is still set in braids.
12:05This man was buried in Western-style boots, customized for desert wear.
12:15Far more telling than the leather pieces were fabrics found near a town called Hami.
12:22For some experts, the mummy fabrics provided a major breakthrough to the possible origins of these nomads.
12:32On the receiving end was archaeologist Irene Good, a fabric expert and an avid weaver.
12:39The Urumqi Museum contracted Good and colleague Elizabeth Barber to examine the fabrics.
12:45When I was first presented with a fragment from Wupu, it just looked like a piece of an old bathrobe
12:55that I had from about fifteen years ago.
12:57So, it was that well-preserved.
13:01Like detectives use fingerprints, archaeologists identify mysterious cultures by the color and weave of ancient fabrics.
13:11Irene Good scanned a color photo of the cloth sample into a computer.
13:18The scan enabled her to construct a computer image of how the fabric looked when new.
13:25The result was incredible.
13:28The cloth was woven in a twill similar to samples found in Europe, dating back three thousand years.
13:35I was really kind of awestruck.
13:38A twill weave is something we're all familiar with.
13:41It's the same as in your blue jeans.
13:43What intrigued me about this fabric was not only that it's a twill weave, which is characteristically European and not
13:51characteristically Chinese, although the Chinese did have the technology for it.
13:55It was also the coloration, the pattern of color usage on the field of the cloth is what we call
14:04plaid or actually possibly even some kind of a tartan.
14:11The fabric surrendered another extraordinary clue under a scanning electron microscope.
14:19Individual wool fibers were magnified hundreds of times.
14:25Good compared them to fibers from indigenous Asian sheep.
14:31The type of wool appeared to be of a type that's not known in Western Asia, but in Iron Age
14:39Europe.
14:41The ancient Xinjiang fabrics were more than Western in design.
14:45They were Western to the very fiber.
14:56The Middle of the Desert Mummies is sponsored in part by Mercedes Benz, located on the way.
15:08Encouraged by the early finds, archaeologists wondered if Caucasian burials were widespread throughout Xinjiang.
15:16Wang Binghua and his colleagues took a second look at the journals of early explorers.
15:27On March 28, 1900, a Swedish expedition walked into a Silk Road ghost town called Lulan.
15:40The party uncovered tons of antiquities in the ruins, unaware that the greatest treasures were hidden deeper still.
15:55Decades later, Xinjiang archaeologists theorized that humans could have occupied Lulan long before the Silk Road began.
16:06Joined by a Japanese team, they mounted the most ambitious desert expedition in Chinese history.
16:19An ancient citadel was excavated and a strange formation surfaced.
16:26Wooden stakes were found arranged in concentric rings.
16:30They marked the tomb of six male corpses.
16:36The most sensational find was yet to come.
16:42A body was found wrapped in a coffin of poplar wood.
17:04The package looked as though it were buried yesterday.
17:09Layer after layer of treated fabric was peeled away.
17:16A woman appeared, four feet nine inches tall.
17:20She was utterly preserved along with her wardrobe.
17:25Called the beauty of Lulan, her features were strikingly Caucasian.
17:39But the cast of mummies was not yet complete.
17:42Not by a long shot.
17:46In 1985, Xinjiang's archaeologists moved the search into the southeastern Taklamakan.
17:54In church and county, they struck pay dirt.
18:01Several hundred tomb sites were discovered.
18:05They found a mummified infant.
18:08Wrapped in purple wool, the eyes were covered with colored stones to keep the lids closed.
18:14A second grave was completely undisturbed and provided the most spectacular mummies found to date.
18:23The male, nicknamed Churchin Man, must have cut quite a figure while alive.
18:30Archaeologists calculated he stood over six feet tall.
18:35Even in death, the features of his face were strong, his blonde eyelashes and beard intact.
18:42A female mummy, Churchin woman, had yellowish-brown hair arranged in four braids.
18:48The preservation was so complete, the couple seemed more asleep than dead.
19:00Discoveries of artifacts and bodies showed the Caucasian presence in western China was widespread,
19:05but a profound question remained unanswered.
19:12When did these people first enter China?
19:15At what point in history did their struggle to survive Xinjiang begin?
19:27Chinese investigators used a time machine to find out.
19:33The process is called carbon-14 dating.
19:38Carbon-14 is an isotope found in everything organic.
19:43When an organism dies, emissions of carbon-14 decrease at a well-established speed that reveals its age.
19:52At the Urumqi Institute of Geology, wood pieces found in the mummy burials were heated to release carbon dioxide gas.
20:10The gas was purified and condensed.
20:16The samples were placed in a machine to measure the rate of carbon-14 emissions.
20:28The moment of truth had come as computers calculated the ages of the specimens.
20:36The dates that confronted Wang Binghua and his colleagues were almost beyond belief.
20:47Through carbon dating, the mummies of Xinjiang were forced, at last, to admit their age.
21:04Reflected in the faces of the Xinjiang mummies lay a new revelation.
21:09They endured in China for centuries.
21:15This male died in the Gobi 2,000 years before Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor.
21:26Earlier still, Church and Man was buried 3,000 years ago,
21:30the period when Troy was destroyed in the Trojan Wars.
21:39Wupu woman predates Church and Man by two centuries more.
21:47Earlier still, some 3,500 years ago, as the Greeks devised their first alphabet,
21:54this child took its last breath in China.
22:00The Lulan beauty holds the age record.
22:03She was buried 4,000 years ago, about the time of the earliest Egyptian mummies.
22:14Imagine a man of 4,000 years ago, looking calm, well-dressed, with his daily necessity by his side.
22:22Shows up in front of you, telling you about his life, about the time he lived, and about his surroundings.
22:29The rich information he gives you is really beyond what one can imagine.
22:39But one piece of information baffled the experts.
22:43How did these ancient peoples, barely surviving the elements, manage to mummify their dead?
22:51Had the peoples of Xinjiang employed mummification techniques similar to those of ancient Egyptians?
22:59Had this science spread to the remote deserts of Xinjiang?
23:08The beauty of Lulan is one of the best-preserved mummies of Xinjiang.
23:15Because of her condition, archaeologists hope to find both her cause of death and clues to her mummification.
23:28Lodged in the mummy's hair were lice.
23:30Their discovery remains a mystery, since these insects only prey on the living.
23:39Lulan Beauty's probable killer was dust and soot found in her lungs.
23:44The dust from sandstorms, the soot from cooking fires.
23:50The autopsy also revealed that along with her lungs, the woman's intestines and other internal organs were still intact.
24:02Egyptian mummification involved the removal of the intestines to prevent the decomposition of a corpse.
24:10Unlike the Egyptians, the Xinjiang people expected a certain amount of decay.
24:16They knew that as the bodies of their dead decomposed, the tongues would swell up, forcing the mouths open.
24:25Chin straps prevented this unsightly possibility long enough for the body to be buried.
24:34Strips of leather bound the mummy's hands together as well.
24:38In this way, the arms were kept from falling to the side, creating a more dignified pose.
24:57If the ancients of Xinjiang were not mummified in the Egyptian style, what extraordinary process saved them from decay?
25:27At the Wupu dig, the mummies were found resting on mud bricks, the finger marks of the ancient brickmakers still
25:34visible.
25:37The bricks insulated the mummy from direct contact with the soil.
25:43From above, the corpse was protected by a roof of logs, reed matting, and finally, soil.
25:52The arid desert air circulated freely. In essence, the bodies were freeze-dried.
26:05Under such dryness, bacteria can hardly grow. The natural rotting of the body quickly stops in such dry air, and
26:15therefore, we have today complete well-preserved bodies.
26:26It's unlikely the ancients of Xinjiang were aware at first of the natural forces acting on their death.
26:48Like other ancient peoples, they buried the deceased in the ground, unprotected.
26:59Over time, bacteria and insects consumed everything but the bones.
27:11Months later, the remains were disinterred and moved to a permanent cemetery.
27:25But when the ancients of Xinjiang returned to their temporary graves, they discovered something amazing had occurred.
27:36Instead of bones, they found many of the bodies were mysteriously preserved.
27:48Over the centuries, the magical properties of the desert were enhanced with homespun innovations.
27:56Before burial, an ointment, most likely made from animal fat, was applied to the corpse.
28:05Wherever investigators found it on the mummies, the skin was more supple and better preserved.
28:21Something else found on the mummies was far more difficult to explain.
28:28Strange symbols in vivid colors gave hints to a secret world of spiritual rites and magical powers.
28:43When the graves of the church and mummies were unearthed, a gateway to a lost world of ancient beliefs was
28:50opened.
28:55Some experts believe the emblems were at the center of some form of religion.
29:03The ancients may have engaged in sun worship, a faith embraced by early cultures around the world.
29:24And then there was this hat.
29:28Experts did a double-take when it surfaced.
29:31The hat is made of felt and looks like a prop from the Wizard of Oz.
29:41It was far too awkward for daily wear.
29:45Researchers speculate the woman who wore them led some sort of religious or magical rites.
29:55Others argue the hats were marks of social status.
30:05It's clear that these ancient people believed that peaceful coexistence and civic order were crucial to their survival in the
30:12desert.
30:15Some believe their struggle included heroic attempts to fight death itself.
30:26As forensic studies continued, researchers were astonished by the wounds on this male adult.
30:33They're very clean cuts.
30:36They wouldn't have been made by a spear or other weapon.
30:38And they're tied up with horse hair sutures.
30:41It would seem that this was an attempt to surgically cure some illness that this man was suffering from.
30:47Probably a lung disease.
30:48Because there was a lot of lung disease out there from soot and from wind-borne sand.
30:56In fact, a third-century text describes mysterious surgical procedures introduced into China from an unknown foreign land.
31:06It says right here that if a disease is not cured by medicine or acupuncture, that then an incision can
31:15be made.
31:15The diseased organ can be taken out, washed, cleaned, sewed up, and you're back in business.
31:22So, surgery did exist in the third century AD.
31:26And there's no reason to believe that it might not also have existed in the third or fourth century BC.
31:37According to the ancient text, pain was deadened with the sedative of wine mixed with a morphine-like substance.
31:51It's also written that patients began to feel better four or five days after the procedure with complete recovery in
31:58a month.
32:03But the wounds on this individual never healed.
32:06Whether he met his end on the operating table is yet to be proven.
32:10But the evidence is compelling.
32:16A mind-bending scenario was becoming more and more real to Wang Binghua and researchers around the world.
32:24Two thousand years before the birth of Christ,
32:27Western peoples of unknown origin were not only visiting China,
32:32they were living there, praying there, dying there.
32:40More links between China and Europe were found in the 1980s.
32:50Nomadic shepherds told researchers of a strange mound that lay at the foot of the Tian Shan Mountains.
33:00Beneath it was the ruins of a building called Langzhou Wanzha.
33:04It is the only Bronze Age structure built by Caucasians ever discovered in China.
33:14Three thousand years ago, these walls sheltered a people as alien to this region as the Vikings were to Newfoundland.
33:26Partial proof of Western habitation was confirmed by this cooking pot in the ruins.
33:32It's nearly identical to pots found in Europe.
33:37Like a bronze question mark, it challenged archaeologists to dig deeper for answers.
33:47Where did the Caucasians come from?
33:50How did they travel into China?
34:02This program is brought to you in part by Charles Schwab, creating a world of smarter investors.
34:07This program is brought to you in part by MCI five cents.
34:14If Caucasians migrated from the west to China, how could they conquer the high mountain passes that surround Xinjiang?
34:25It has been said that humanity began to conquer time and space when it learned to sit firmly on the
34:31back of a horse.
34:36Today, the horses raised in Xinjiang are considered the finest in all of China.
34:42Kazakh shepherds still rely on them.
34:48If the ancient Caucasians had domesticated horses, it could help explain how they reached China.
34:57Far from the meadows of Xinjiang, anthropologist David Anthony got a tip straight from the horse's mouth.
35:06Anthony looked for clues to early Caucasian horseback riding at the base of the Ural Mountains,
35:12part of a region language experts call Indo-Europe.
35:17Working with Russian archaeologists, he found the skeleton of an ancient horse at a site called Bataille.
35:24The remains were 5,000 years old.
35:28Just looking at the bones, it's hard to tell whether an ancient horse from an archaeological excavation was eaten for
35:34dinner or used in transport in some way.
35:37And this is the way we approached it.
35:39We decided to study bitware.
35:42Normally, when a bit is in a horse's mouth, it sits here, which is on the tongue and on the
35:49gums.
35:49Now, if a horse doesn't like that, it can use its tongue to push the bit back into its teeth
35:55in order to keep it from slipping back onto the tongue and the gums.
35:58We decided to look at that part of the horse's tooth to see if we could find microscopic scratches, abrasions,
36:07traces of the wear made by the horse chewing on the bit.
36:11And we did.
36:13The wear on the front edge of the ancient tooth had created a sloping edge as seen in this diagram.
36:20But how could Anthony be sure it was created by a bit?
36:24Now, we wanted to know what kind of bit could have made the wear that we saw on these horses
36:29in northern Kazakhstan.
36:31So we conducted an experiment at SUNY Kobolskill, a State University of New York campus near here,
36:38in which we rode horses that had never been bitted with organic bits just to see can a bit made
36:44of leather or rope create that kind of wear.
36:48Aside from rope, bits made of deer antlers and bone were also used.
36:57After weeks of riding, the horses were carefully sedated.
37:03Anthony made plaster casts of their teeth to examine the wear marks.
37:18The marks produced by the bits were nearly identical to the wear marks on the ancient horse teeth from Bataille.
37:26So this establishes that horseback riding began early enough in Eurasia,
37:31so that the people that were excavated in Xinjiang, the mummies of Xinjiang,
37:36could easily have been using horses as transport animals to help get them there,
37:41to provide the means of transportation.
37:43The earliest of those mummies is about 2,000 B.C.
37:46We have evidence for horseback riding between 3,000 and 3,500 B.C.,
37:51right out in the middle of Eurasia in the northern grasslands of Kazakhstan.
38:00Two items were discovered in the Xinjiang mummy graves that support this theory.
38:06The first, a simple horse whip.
38:10The second, a fragment of a 3,000-year-old wagon wheel.
38:18After some 20 years, the circle of clues seemed to be closing.
38:275,000 years ago, Europeans occupied the western steppes
38:31and began raising herds of sheep and domesticating horses.
38:40A thousand years later, a vast, hurting economy extended from Europe
38:45and most likely into northwest China.
38:52The evidence for a European migration was impressive,
38:56but revolutionary concepts require absolute verification.
39:03The only place to find the truth was within the mummy's DNA.
39:11Hi, I'm Michael.
39:15The search began a half a world away from China,
39:18on the Italian island of Sardinia.
39:25Paolo Francolacci is a scientist at the University of Sassari,
39:31where he specializes in ancient genetic material.
39:37Recently, Francolacci embarked on an extraordinary assignment.
39:43With the help of Xinjiang experts, he was allowed to extract tissue samples from the mummies.
39:51The object was to isolate their 4,000-year-old DNA.
40:00DNA is a double-twist of molecules that contain the genetic blueprint of every cell in our bodies.
40:12By comparing the DNA of the mummies with modern Asian and European DNA,
40:18Francolacci hoped to establish the origins of the mummies of Xinjiang.
40:24Tissue was harvested from the unexposed areas of the bodies,
40:28usually from the inner thighs or underarms.
40:32The biggest concern was contamination.
40:35A single skin cell from his own hand could taint the entire study.
40:40I don't want to go there to analyze my DNA, of course.
40:43So we must be very careful.
40:45And so we must wear a glass, face mask.
40:47We must definitely avoid the touch with bare hands, the corpses.
40:55Working at the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Sardinia
40:58and Stanford University in California, Paolo Francolacci began a painstaking process.
41:07Tissue samples were unpacked and ground into cells.
41:15DNA was extracted and treated in a special machine that uses precise heat to replicate DNA.
41:29A.
41:32Radioactive isotopes were added to the solution.
41:36Placed in special gels, the DNA material migrated down hidden channels and formed a pattern.
41:43A.
41:44A.
41:45A.
41:46A.
41:46There and this is a full of IVALV,
41:47which is not the most commonplace.
41:52A.
42:11Exposed with ultraviolet light,
42:14Frank Alacci took a snapshot of a human pedigree some 40 centuries old.
42:27The DNA patterns of the mummies were compared with living groups of people from China to
42:33Europe.
42:35It's possible to say at this point of the research that these people shared with Europeans some
42:40common genes.
42:41It's very hard for me to be more precise at this point because I would need more samples
42:47for that.
42:57The mummies of Xinjiang are most likely the end players of a migration that shaped our
43:04world.
43:11Along a grassland highway came prehistoric explorers looking for richer pastures.
43:23Ultimately, they crossed the snowy mountain passes into China.
43:40When you look into the face of one of these mummies, you're looking at an individual who
43:47played a role in a drama that ultimately united the East with the West.
43:52A moment in history when Eurasia was tied together as a single world.
43:59And it's a moment that through the innovations that were developed at that time has ultimately
44:06affected almost all of the people in the world.
44:10The fate of these ancient explorers is the final mystery to be solved.
44:20Based on the human remains discovered, the last of the Caucasoid mummies lived 2,500 years
44:26ago.
44:28Did their people simply vanish?
44:31The answer may be simplicity itself.
44:35As the mummy excavations continued, the remains of Asians were discovered buried side by side
44:41with Caucasians, all from the same period.
44:46They seem to have gotten along very well and even intermarried.
44:50And it's interesting to observe that they were buried in the same graves sometimes.
44:54I think this is a good indication that people can get along together, even 3,000 years ago.
45:05We can only imagine the moment when East met West, only guess at the emotions that flowed from
45:11one side to the other.
45:30Perhaps both peoples looked beyond the shape of an eye or the cut of a blouse and recognized
45:35something incredible had happened.
45:39That beyond the grasslands and deserts that once seemed so endless, they were not alone.
45:47Mixed by time, the threads of blood and family, East and West, merged and disappeared into the
45:55fabric of China itself.
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