In 1900, a Rob hunter named Oldek stumbled upon the legendary "Thousand Graves" in the lower valley of the Peacock River in the Lop Nur area (present-day Ruoqiang County), which is now the Xiaohe Cemetery.
Oldek's discovery has aroused great interest among many European archaeologists and explorers. In fact, since the end of the 19th century, the European archaeological community has set off a trend of "Xinjiang archaeology". For a time, many explorers, scholars and pseudo-scholars such as Sven Hedin, Stein, Berthihe and many other explorers came to the scene, driven by archaeological curiosity and wealth ambitions.
It was also under the impetus of this "archaeological" trend that Sven Hedin appointed the Swedish archaeologist Bergmann to hire Oldek as a guide to find the "Thousand Graves". After many obstacles, Bergmann and Oldek crossed the Peacock River by boat and finally found the "Thousand Graves" that spread among the people.
Because there is an unnamed river not far from this group of tombs, Bergmann named the group of tombs after the "little river", and the current name "Little River Cemetery" was born. In fact, the original name of this small river was "Kumdalya", which means Sand River, but unfortunately Bergman did not know its name at that time.
Swipe to view high-resolution images
Bergman excavated a total of 12 tombs in the Xiaohe cemetery, with a collection of more than 200 pieces, and he also found that some of the clothes unearthed in the tombs, especially the fringed waist cloth, were strikingly similar to the Danish Bronze Age tomb excavations, but he did not believe that there was a direct connection between the two. Eventually, Bergmann transported the excavated tombs and collections to Stockholm.
After digging the Xiaohe cemetery, which had been sleeping for thousands of years, Bergman wrote a famous archaeological declaration in his archaeological journal "Xinjiang Archaeology":
"In their last sleep, everything faithfully flowed into death, and the relatives prepared for them all the provisions of the afterlife and all the symbolic objects that sustained the human life of the past. Countless storms roared overhead, and in the quiet of the night, the eternal galaxy hung high above their heads, and every summer, the fiery sun shone on their bodies, which was why they were so fortunate to have a peaceful resting place for a long time, until one day, strangers came here to disturb their unawakened sleep—in order to discover something unknown. ”
▲ Taklamakan Desert at night
Although with the publication of Bergmann's "Archaeology of Xinjiang", Xiaohe Cemetery has attracted widespread attention from academic circles around the world with its grand scale, special burial customs and rich cultural heritage, few people have embarked on an archaeological journey to Xiaohe Cemetery after Bergmann.
In 2003, under the attempt of Wang Binghua, former director of the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and others, the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology finally sent an archaeological team to officially enter the Xiaohe Cemetery to carry out comprehensive scientific archaeology, and the Xiaohe Cemetery was able to re-enter people's vision.
After 4 years and 10 months of fieldwork, the known cemetery area has reached 2500 square meters, divided into two areas: north and south. The cemetery is divided into five floors from top to bottom from the top down. The number of tombs excavated by the archaeological team reached 330 in the Xiaohe Cemetery, although unfortunately 160 of them had been stolen by tomb robbers before the excavations. follow
With a large number of dried corpses unearthed, the Xiaohe Cemetery has become the single site with the largest number of dried corpses found in the world so far. At the same time, the Little River Cemetery has become one of the earliest archaeological cultures found in the Tarim Basin to date, spanning between 4,000 and 3,500 years.
Who are the people buried in the Little River Cemetery?
When exploring the evolutionary context of ancient populations, it is difficult to systematically and accurately restore the historical trajectory of population migration and integration by relying only on traditional historical materials and archaeological evidence, and it is difficult to quantify the parameters of population and direction when different ancient populations interact, but emerging molecular anthropological means provide this possibility, that is, through the help of genetics and ancient DNA research technology, we can reconstruct the historical picture of migration and integration of ancient populations. The evolutionary history of the Small River population that follows is based on the latest achievements in the molecular anthropology community in recent years.
The tombs of Xiaohe Cemetery can be divided into five layers from the bottom up, roughly forming a three-layer aboveground (1, 2, 3- layer) and two-story (4, 5-story) structure below ground, and the deeper the number of layers, the older the age.
There is a time difference of nearly five hundred years between the deepest and highest known burial layers, and the change of more than five centuries is manifested in the changes in the small river population not only in culture, but also in the increasingly diverse bloodlines.
The pedigree composition of the small river population is very complex, and the DNA includes components from Europe, South Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia. Even the early xiaohe population in the deepest burial layer has already shown a multi-mixed characteristic of both European and North Asian and East Asian components in terms of pedigree, and the genetic diversity of the various burial layers is increasing as the burial layer is replaced from bottom to top.
That is, from the time when the Xiaohe people settled in the southeast of the Tarim Basin 4,000 years ago, in the following 500 years, the Xiaohe people interacted extensively with the surrounding populations and also underwent genetic exchanges.
Genetic exchange has also been accompanied by some changes in cultural concepts. In both underground floors there are sacrificial clay coffins, all of which are women, and in front of the coffins there are bull head sacrifices, these burial customs reflect the high status of women in the early Xiaohe people's society.
However, this particular burial ritual for women was not found in the upper three layers, which meant that with the passage of time and the migration of outsiders, the society of the Xiaohe people underwent a major cultural transformation.
From the DNA point of view, the maternal DNA of the early population of Xiaohe has more North Asian and East Asian components, there are also some European components, and the patrilineal DNA is all European components, which indicates that at least 4000 years ago, the Eastern and Western populations have met in the Xinjiang region of China, and completed genetic exchange, with the interaction with the surrounding population, the maternal and patrilineal DNA of the middle and late populations in the Small River are mainly European components
Where do the creek crowds come from?
Xinjiang has been an important hub for the exchange of civilizations between the East and the West since ancient times.
People from east and west migrated to Xinjiang since the early Bronze Age, and although the earliest human activities in Xinjiang date back to 40,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of stable inhabitation groups in the Tarim Basin can only be traced back to 3,000 to 2,000 years BC.
In addition to the Xiaohe population, Xinjiang during the Bronze Age (from the 4th millennium BC to the first millennium BC) had bronze civilizations in Altay, Ili, Hami and Barikun.
DNA research results show that most of the DNA components of the eastern and western populations in Xinjiang at that time were mainly European components, and there was a certain consistency in structure and type.
Those bronze civilizations entered the Iron Age through continuous development and evolution.
The DNA of the early Iron Age population was naturally inherited from the Bronze Civilization, but as the population in northeastern Xinjiang (Altay, Hami, etc.) continued to be influenced by people from North asia and East Asia, the main DNA components began to tend to North Asia and East Asian components. As a result, during the Bronze Age, the DNA composition consistency of the eastern and western populations in Xinjiang began to show some small differences.
From about the 9th century BC, the Xinjiang region entered the Iron Age. The earliest nomadic peoples appeared in Eurasia at the beginning of the Iron Age.
These Indo-European nomadic peoples expanded rapidly between Eurasia with advanced technologies such as horse training and wheeled chariots, and attracted by the fertile soil suitable for nomadic production, these nomadic peoples entered the northern Xinjiang region, where nomadic production methods were popularized.
Thus a new round of cultural and ethnic exchanges and integration officially began in this period, and human civilization embarked on an unprecedented peak in the Iron Age, and since then the horn of civilization has been blown in all corners of the world.
A series of civilizations with nomadic cultural overtones have emerged in the northern Xinjiang region, while the southern Xinjiang region is still the absolute mainstream of oasis farming civilization. In terms of DNA composition, the oasis farming population in the Tarim Basin of southern Xinjiang at this time has similarities and continuities with the nomadic cultural groups in the Ili region of northern Xinjiang.
By the 3rd century BC, the Hun Khaganate, a state-sized political body of early nomadic peoples in human history, was born. The formation of the Xiongnu Khanate opened the historical prelude to the frequent interaction between the northern nomads and the people of China's various agricultural cultural areas in the course of more than two thousand years.
The mighty Hun Khaganate exported its influence to the four directions, accompanied by the spread and movement of a large number of northern nomads, who injected fresh blood into the northern and western populations of China.
The northern steppes after the Xiongnu became a gladiatorial arena for nomadic tribes to pursue power. From Ruoran to Turks, from Uighurs to Mongolia, the desert steppes intermittently gave birth to a succession of nomadic powers, all of which hoped to radiate their spheres of influence to the northern and northwestern regions of present-day China.
As a result, in the midst of war and trade, between exchanges and collisions, the role of nomadic peoples from the northern steppes in the evolution of the ancient population in Xinjiang has been increasing, and the languages from the northern steppes (such as Uighur and Mongolian) have taken root in this land.
At the same time, those original civilized groups have not disappeared, and later Uighur, Mongolian and other languages carry the language of the previous population, and their blood intersects with the blood of the previous population.
Continuous convergence and integration may be an important reason for the rapid development of human beings after leaving Africa, and the integration of blood and cultural pluralism have undoubtedly run through the evolution of human civilization from beginning to end.
From the Bronze Age to today
In the vicissitudes of thousands of years of history, Xinjiang has witnessed the development, rise and disappearance of countless civilizations, as well as the aggregation and dissipation of countless ethnic groups.
The grand legends of a hero, a city, a civilization and even an era are just embellishments of Xinjiang's long history.
Groups of people have developed and flourished here, and civilizations have shone here and attracted the attention of the whole world.
Even the prosperous and glorious ancient city of Loulan may disappear overnight, but the pace of history has not and will not stop - when the ancient city of Loulan is submerged in the yellow sand, there are still new oasis civilizations around it quietly emitting new light.
Different groups of people are writing their own stories in this land, they are writing their own history, but they are also continuing the history of the previous group. And when this history is handed down to us today, what we receive is a chapter created by thousands of different people.
Looking back at the ancient Xinjiang population, it is not difficult to find that these groups include groups from Indo-European, Altai, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan and some unknown languages and language families, who have different ethnic characteristics, different languages and cultures, and the same is true in production and lifestyle.
The baton of history has been passed down to us under the succession of these seemingly very different groups, and our language and culture are integrated with the languages of those different ancient groups, and the shadows of those from the East and the West are also illuminated in our genes.
In the grand history of human evolution, "Who are we?" Where do we come from? There is no easy answer.
bibliography:
1.Fan Zhang, Ashley Scott. The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies. Nature599,19-20(2021)
2.Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaohe_Cemetery#cite_note-genetics-2
3.Li, C. et al. Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age. BMC Biol. 8, 15 (2010).
4.Li, C. et al. Analysis of ancient human mitochondrial DNA from the Xiaohe cemetery: insights into prehistoric population movements in the Tarim Basin, China. BMC Genet. 16, 78 (2015).
5.237 cases of mitochondrial whole genome reveal the evolutionary history of ancient populations in Xinjiang 5000-500 years ago.
6. From the perspective of genetics, a preliminary study on the influence of prehistoric Eastern and Western populations on Xinjiang is the study of the maternal genetic diversity of human remains excavated from the Xiaohe Cemetery
Narenkova. Walk into the creek. Identification and Appreciation of Cultural Relics.04(2021).
7. Idilis Abdul Resul. Little River Cemetery What is the true identity of the "Little River Princess"?
8.David Reich. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. Oxford University Press.
9.Jan Romgard (2008). "Questions of Ancient Human Settlements in Xinjiang and the Early Silk Road Trade, with an Overview of the Silk Road Research Institutions and Scholars in Beijing, Gansu, and Xinjiang" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers (185)
10. Li Chunxiang. Molecular genetics of ancient biological remains at the Little River Cemetery
#Historical Stories # -END-
This article is originally written by "I come from Xinjiang", welcome to pay attention to, take you to understand the familiar and unfamiliar Xinjiang