A quite thorough examination!

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Not really, they didn't say whether it was a good smoke or not.

Dude.... dude..... hey, take a hit of this ancient weed man, I'm writing a paper on it man and I need some more data.

In other news, an examination of the tomb found that the 2700-year-old Caucasoid shaman died of a terminal case of the munchies.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Or... Tests reveal cause of death of Caucasoid shaman; Lethal cannabis...

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Beneath the stars came falling on our heads.
But they're just old light, they're just old light.

Regina Spektor - Samson

I read that as "Ancient Cannibals from Central Asia".

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I want to go back to the moon.
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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

My bold.

As close to an impossible way to die I can think of.

I am amazed that the plant matter was still even recognizable.

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"In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity."- Fritjof Capra

www.gonzoscience.com

Thank you. Good to know.

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Beneath the stars came falling on our heads.
But they're just old light, they're just old light.

Regina Spektor - Samson

The cannabis is cool and all.

But why was it buried with a caucasoid man in the Gobi Desert? I can appreciate the burying of cannabis...

but caucasoid...I just finished reading a fascinating book on mummies that included some caucasoid mummies (three or four I think) from the Gobi that threw anthropogists into fits because of the time of history that seemed to be involved.

I don't remember if Pringle pursued why, or what they came up with. Even if caucasions were that far east, what were they doing in a position in society to be buried with that much weed?

This, (the social/anthropological side) is fascinating to me. If Pringle did pursue that lead, I skipped it and will have to look up more information on the subject.

Anyone have insight into caucasoid travels pre-Marco polo? I'm not looking for "Joe got lost" so much as "Joe discovered the neighbors 1K/away had great pot and traded for it..." or something like that. Or "Joe introduced them to MaryJ and the two were ordained as king and queen" or something. Jokes and points both intended.

*ETA: I CERTAINLY don't remember Pringle mentioning cannabis being found with these particular mummies...

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None to speak of

Whatever the reasons, looks like he was possibly taking what he/his grave-maker thought he could use 'later'...

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And no, I wasn't smoking any .

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None to speak of

As it happens, I just listened to a Hardcore History podcast on the steppe peoples. Dan Carlin, the podcaster, explains that there apparently were caucasian people in east Asia. Writings from ancient China refer to steppe people (they didn't call them that) to thier north and west that had red hair, green eyes, were tall, etc. These weren't travellers, mind you, but rather some of the groups of nomadic herder people that we group together as steppe people today. The Huns, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Xiongnu, and many others fall into this category. Some were of Scandanavian origin and had migrated (or were forced by the continual fighting) east.

ETA: Carlin also mentions use of marijuana and lots of other intoxicants by the Scythians. Apparently, they liked to stay blasted pretty much all the time.

Oh cool, you couldn't tell me where to find that particular podcast could you?

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None to speak of

Show #12:

http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php?page=hharchive

Bong?

'2,700 Year-Old Man Claims Friend's Stash'

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Look what the smoking did to his skin.

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Serendipitously...

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Got it, thanks Geonuc

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None to speak of

You can be short and have dark hair and brown eyes, and still be caucasian. The steppes, which reasonably includes East Turkestan, are commonly referred to as Central Asia, though "Eurasia" seems to be the term favored by academe now.

Carlin was probably just repeating something Herodotus told him. The wikipedia article states that genetic studies of remains have connected the Scythians with the Slavs, Persians and east asian peoples. According to Herodotus, the Scythians own account of their origin is that the first Scythian king, Targitaus, [w]as the child of the sky-god and of a daughter of the Dnieper. While it's nothing special to claim descent from a god, the interesting aspect of this is that the human side of this family comes from the Dnieper, a river of Ukraine. This supports a western origin.

An apt description of yours truly. Eurasia indeed had caucasoid and middle eastern peoples at various times. But the Gobi is way East. Here is a map from Encarta.

That part of the East is very definitely in Asia, and thought to be peopled by Asians: short for the most part, black hair, narrow eyes...

The presence of caucasoids receiving a burial like this in the Gobi is somewhat unexpected. I remember hearing some interesting things about Ghangis Khan, and Carlin mentions it also, but those facts have more or less been ignored or thought of as "he was talked up". Pringles made a similar comment in "The Mummy Congresses". The story is that a mummy researcher was visiting a museum in Asia and came upon some clearly caucasoid mummies that had been recovered in the Gobi. She made reference to some early Chinese writings that seemed to describe such peoples, but had been written off previously because the groups were not known to have mixed. The few comments were disregarded or thought to be 'poetic license'. That understanding is now being revisited by some researchers to see if dates line up, etc.

I am not saying the Mongolians were purely Asian, but I would argue that they were enough so to not be particularly out of place in the developing cultures of the region. Certainly not caucasoid, at least from what we know.

I don't remember the details more than that, sorry. I returned the book to the library.

I have no idea. When I get a few--will hopefully be settled next week--I may put some more time into reading. We'll see if my interest stays piqued.

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None to speak of

Yes, but the point is that a tall, red-haired, green-eyed person is most probably not of east Asian descent.

I think "Steppe peoples" gets the idea across. The steppes are a recognized geographic region.

If you listen to the podcast (and read the list of show notes, which goes well beyond Herodotus) you might find that Carlin has a good handle on who was who.

/Nitpick

The steppes are still north/west of the Gobi, stretching from the Urals eastward toward the Himalayas. Not sure where the boundary lies to the west, but the Gobi and Mongolia were home to Asiatic people in modern times. Based on our understanding of contact between the groups, it was thought this was the case for the entire history of the region which is turning out not to be the case.

/end Nitpick

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None to speak of

I don't understand the nitpick. Neither I nor - more importantly - Carlin, suggest otherwise.

Yes, the Gobi is further East than the areas I mentioned. It's outside the range of the Scythians, as least as portrayed in the Wikipedia article. This is interesting, but not amazing in the way that Kennewick man would be if he were caucasoid. People have always moved around. I think there's a misconception that travel and migration are recent inventions, and that if you went back more than a few hundred years you'd find "pure races" isolated in their homelands.

Asians aren't necessarily short, moreover neither are mongoloids (which you seem to mean when you said "Asian"). North Chinese are often tall. You have to be careful with Chinese descriptions: they have a very broad idea of what constitutes "red". I've heard them call hair "red" that you or I would call auburn, brown or blonde.

Anthropologist Christy Turner of Arizona State University has done the preeminent work on the dental variations of Native American people and relating them to their Asian ancestors. The variation he notes are called Sinodonty and Sundadonty.



From NationMaster

It would be interesting to know what tooth structure the mummies had.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

Most scholars agree that by around 40,000 BC glaciation had connected the Japanese islands with the Asian mainland

I'm not sure about this. Wikipedia has a map that makes it clear that Honshu-Shikoku-Kyushu was not directly connected to the mainland, but it makes it unclear whether these islands were joined to Hokkaido (which was). The fact that the Tsugaru Strait is a major biogeographic boundary suggests not. OTOH I find several non-academic sources online claiming that all the major Japanese islands were connected to the mainland. Maybe the map wikipedia uses is wrong.

I would think that to be a relatively rare misconception. It's my impression that it's generally known that ancient peoples migrated, and quite frequently.

In the context of the history lesson I recently received from Mr Carlin, which provoked some of this discussion of the steppe peoples, that was a key feature to his talk. They moved and they moved a lot.

And I am very interested in who "they" were. The more we know about the extant populations that existed 40, 30, and 20 kya the better an idea we will have about those migrations and inter relationships that probably existed. Eastern Russia is just now starting to be investigated seriously. I think we have much yet to learn.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

Whoa. That's well before the period I'm talking about and well before the OP's cannibis man.

True, gotta start the timeline somwhere>

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"