12.27 -12.29

http://www.africaresource.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=506:tracing-human-diversity-through-the-ages&catid=117:science&Itemid=361
12.27
A coalition of Stanford scientists has released the most detailed road map yet of human diversity, offering insight into the emergence and restless migration of the world's populations...

A group of Russian people called the Yakuts, native to the cold, dry tundra of Siberia, share genetic similarities with people indigenous to South and Central America - such as the Mayans, the Pima and even the Surui of the Brazilian jungles. This supports theories about human migration from Siberia across the Bering Strait to the Americas

12.28
Chinese fall into northern and southern groups. People who live along the northern border near Mongolia are genetically distinct from the Han Chinese of the southern part of the nation
...
In the future, they hope to have access to samples from even more populations, adding to the map.

12.29 (Silk Road mummies provide clues to history)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2010-03-18-silkroadmummies18_ST_N.htm

The mummies from western China's arid Tarim Basin are so well-preserved that the viewer can see their intricate clothing and eyelashes, and also that they are distinctly non-Asian in appearance.
One mummy, affectionately dubbed the "Beauty of Xiaohe" by archaeologists, is so lifelike that she looks as if she's taking a nap. She has fair skin, round eyes, and a felt hat resembling an alpine head covering with a long feather stuck in the top


The mummies' Caucasian appearance suggests that Bronze Age nomads speaking Indo-European languages from perhaps Russia and Ukraine brought culture, physical features and genes to parts of western China and may have also been the first to domesticate the horse, says Spencer Wells, who has studied the Tarim mummies and is director of the National Geographic Society's The Genographic Project.

"I was shocked when I saw them. I thought, 'My goodness, they look like Europeans,' " says Victor Mair, a Chinese language and literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the mummies since 1993 and is a co-author of The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples From the West.

Some artifacts found with the mummies, including bronze and sheep bones, hint that Europeans brought technologies such as metallurgy and some domesticated animals to China, which may explain the European appearance of the mummies and suggest that trade between Europe and Asia existed nearly 4,000 years ago, Mair says.

Although the artifacts imply that trade between Europe and Asia existed during the Bronze Age, the Silk Road, a trade route between different parts of Asia, Europe and Africa, did not formally develop until about 138 B.C., during the Han Dynasty.

Western archaeologists have only discovered these mummies relatively recently. It's a very exciting thing."