Uighur
razib | September 22, 2009Sometimes I wonder if the period between the publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes and The Journey of Man, roughly from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, will be seen as a golden age for historical population genetics in hindsight. A few weeks ago I pointed to new data based on DNA extraction which really confuses the picture of how Europe was populated over the past 25,000 years. It seems the more data we get, the more interesting things get. In the late 1990s the emergence of powerful technologies to extract and amplify genetic material and sequence it shed light on several…
razib | August 30, 2009From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road:
...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the Tarim Basin, the final destination of the people who are known to us as the Tokharians.
I've alluded to this before, the unique hybrid aspect of Uighurs probably is due to the fact that the Tarim basin was only recently settled from both the west and east of Eurasia, closing a gap of settlement which might have existed since the Last Glacial…
razib | July 9, 2009Over at Accidental Blogger a remembrance of travels in Xinjiang/East Turkestan. I think the best model for what's going on in China right now is a race riot catalyzed by economic resentment. Uighurs seem to be attacking Hui as well as Han, the Hui being Chinese speakers who are of Muslim background (and by and large are physically indistinguishable from the Han, for example, the Vice Premier of China is a Hui).. Though China is still a poor country much of it is lurching toward modernity; the Uighurs of Xinjiang are an exception to this trend.
Related: Post from last year.