Witness to Tocharia

Razib Khan writes: Yamnaya DNA found in the Tian Mountains. Razib h/t's Eurogenes which is where I too had found it first, but Razib hosts the most-comprehensive summary.

Yamnaya is the north Pontic and Ukrainian culture of the Bronze Age. Since David Anthony's 2007 The Horse, The Wheel, And Language and really since Mallory 1987 and if we're being honest since Gimbutas before all of them, that culture is assumed ancestral to all the IndoEuropean languages.

This includes the "Tocharian" languages... clustering on the Chinese side of those Mountains Of Heaven. As of last April we own documents in three Tocharian languages. All Tocharian texts are Common-Era in date, by which time the Tocharian-speaking peoples had already gone Buddhist and at least one language - Agnean - had already died out.

As for how Tocharian should have started in the eastern Balkans to end up in western China... well, that's been a good question, for the last thirty years or more. There's an ancient third-millennium Bronze Age site at Siberian Afanasievo (Latin orthographies differ); very Yamnaya in culture, and also in DNA. But Afanasievo wasn't literate, so we don't know what language its people spoke. Except that it probably wasn't Aryan: their male DNA is R1b, like mine; and not R1a, like the Andronovo culture to its south by consensus deemed ancestral to Iran and northwest India.

But a lot can happen in two or three thousand years. Maybe Afanasievo got hit by Mongols or Avars. Maybe the winters got bad. Maybe they got the plague - in fact, we know they did catch septicaemic plague, because we've dug up their plague-ridden corpses. So although we have a clear track from Yamnaya to Afanasievo, and some circumstantial evidence of DNA and linguistics from the 400 AD Tarim; we're lacking much in between.

We are now being introduced to Shirenzigou, decidedly on the Han side of the Tian range. The site is Iron Age - which has some meaning in a Chinese context, because China proper never quite had an Age of Iron, since the united Chinese civilisation allowed for a thriving bronze trade well into the gunpowder age which, of course, China invented itself. The approximate century of these not-Chinese mountaineers is 200 BC.

Shirenzigou DNA is a mix - partly east Asian, as we'd expect. [UPDATE 7/28: Eurogenes thinks they're Huns.] But it's also partly Yamnaya. And the male line is R1b - there's no R1a, which means it isn't Aryan.

The conclusion is that Shirenzigou's Yamnaya half is Afanasievo. So, by 200 BC, an Afanasievo-descent population should have made itself even more powerful over the west of the Tarim Basin.

One wonders what the Achaemenids or Alexander's diadochoi would have made of this people. Or if the Qin or the First Han regimes ever encountered them. They were literate on both sides; and Agnean was assuredly a spoken language before it became written-only. We may be discovering live Agnean texts in our lifetimes, as we've discovered Tocharian C.

BEFORE ALL THAT 10/28/21: Junggar. But for this post we don't care; we're at the Qin era and beyond.