Page 112 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

paleoanthropology 1413

Cherchen Man of the Silk Road

The following is a description of the Cherchen Man, nose—not a low bridged Asian nose but a veritable
the most famous of the three-thousand-year-old Cau- Sierra Nevada of a nose—to the far side....
casoid mummies found at Ürümchi a stop along the Passing from the face, one’s eye jumps between
ancient Silk Road. The desiccated corpses and their the violently colored leggings and the purply-red
burial clothing and tapestries survived surprisingly brown two-piece suit that covers most of the man’s
well, giving the archeologist clues to the genetic make- body. Originally the man wore soft white deerskin
up and cultural origins of the mysterious mummies. boots to above his knees—the left one is still there.
But the right one has torn away, revealing horizon-
His face is at rest, eyes closed and sunken, lips slightly
tal stripes of gaudy red, yellow, and blue that put
parted; his hands lie in his lap, while his knees and
Ronald McDonald in the shade... .
head are tilted up—like a man who has just drifted
And his suit? By way of decoration on the plain-
off to sleep in a hammock.Visitors tend to tiptoe and
weave fabric, the tailor of the Cherchen Man’s suit
lower their voices. A two inch beard covers his face,
whipped bright red yarn as a sort of piping over the
and his light brown hair has been twisted—plied
seams of both the shirt body and around the neck
from two strands, not braided from three—into two
and front opening of the shirt. It produces a very
queues that hang halfway down to his chest. Here
subtle but very effective ornamentation—subtle
and there white hairs glint among the yellow-brown
because the piping is so fine and because its bright
betraying his age—somewhere past fifty. He would
red color rest against the purply-red background...
have been an imposing figure in life, for he once
Holding the man’s shirtfront together is a waist cord
stood six feet six inches tall.
plaited from yarns of five different colours: bright
Bright ocher-yellow face paint curls across his tem-
red, dark purply brown, blue, green, and yellow.
ple, sprouting short rats on its outer cheek and revers-
Source: E. W. Barber (1999). The mummies of Ürümchi (pp. 26–27). New York: W. W.
ing its curl as it meanders down to the flatland of his Norton & Company.
cheek before climbing across the great ridge of his
forms of elements contained in rocks “decay” to stable microscopes and computerized tomography have
states at known and constant rates. For earlier periods, helped to enlarge the range of morphologies that can
volcanic rocks (which may be interlayered in sedimen- be brought to bear on such problems. Once species are
tary sequences, and hence give an estimate of the age of recognized, their genealogical relationships (those due
fossil-bearing sediments above and below them) are to ancestry and descent) may be inferred. Again, such
favorite objects of geochemical dating; in more recent inferences are normally based on their morphologies
times, actual fossils (e.g., by radiocarbon) or sometimes and are similarly subject to a variety of algorithms and
even artifacts (e.g., by thermoluminescence) can often approaches. Over the past few decades molecular com-
be assigned dates in years. parisons among extant species have helped solidify our
The fossils themselves provide information of many notions of the relationships among extant species, and
kinds. First, they tell us about the variety of hominids hence of the framework within which hominid fossils
that existed in the past. Based on their anatomical sim- have to be fitted. In the hominid arena, molecular evi-
ilarities and differences, paleontologists first classify dence has served to substantiate the species difference
fossils into species, which are both the basic kinds of between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis,
organisms and the building blocks of ecosystems. Ele- following the recent success of molecular geneticists in
mentary as it may sound, the sorting of fossils into extracting short sections of mitochondrial DNA from
species is one of the most difficult processes in pale- fossils of the latter.
oanthropology, and one of the most contentious. In Further anatomical scrutiny can reveal a great deal
recent years new methods such as scanning by electron about how extinct species may have lived. Particularly