Tarim

Bombshell on the pre-Hsia Tarim mummies: they were not Tocharian. They weren't even para-. As late as 2100-1700 Based Count they were Ancient North Eurasians. h/t just about everybody today from which I'm picking Saraceni and Gizmodo.

The research contrasts this with the Junggar Basin up norf, which is similarly dry and seasonally even colder, so also has well-preserved remains. Those guys had Yamnaya ancestry, even earlier: 3000-2800 BC. The press-releases don't report if Junggar / Dzhungar were Andronovo or Гора Афанасьева; the base-article says the latter, as we should expect given the dates. Either way doesn't matter for Tarim: Junggar wuz IndoEuropean.

Which Bronze Age Tarim wuz not.

UPDATE 6:15 PM MST: Razib got into this last night which I missed, and am kicking myself for missing. He covered all of what I just redundantly did. He does note that the huwite Westerners whose portraits the later Chinese drew (badly) were probably Sogdians, since Afanasievo (or however you latinise it) were a tan lot and the old Bronze-Age Tarim would have, in life, looked almost like Comanche.