China's Tocharian mummies - Silent witnesses of a forgotten past

I've published about it before but with the recent big Silk Road Exhibitions it's good to watch again the NOVA documentary from 1998.

The European Mummies Of China Someone who knows the past, is better able to understand the course of the present... Unbelievable documentary about the Tocharian mummies which have been excavated in North-Western China. Four thousand years ago, a community lived in the Tarim Basin -- in what is now the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China -- in the heart of Asia. The Tarim Basin people thrived there for at least 1,500 years. There are indications that they survived as a culture even into the second century. Then they disappeared. Now their remains are being reclaimed from the sands, and the people of that extinct nation are challenging scientists and scholars to fathom who they may have been, and -- if an answer can be found -- where, in prehistory, they came from. According to sweeping physical evidence, they were not Chinese. They were not even Asian in the present day meaning of the word. They were Tocharians; a Caucasian people and, more importantly, Indo-European/Aryan. To see more, click HERE and HERE.