You may have seen the top image in conjunction with a news article about tipis being burned at Standing Rock. It is a fake.
For those of you sharing it around, please know that it’s actually a photoshopped version of a still from the movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. As you can see, the individuals are in Union uniform, carrying muskets, and snow and haybales have been added as well as cropping the mounted figure out. I, of course, have no idea what actually went down at Standing Rock but please pay attention to what you’re sharing and do your research. Not everything you read is true and regardless of what really happened, using a false image deliberately changed in order to stir up anger is bad journalism and does not make good credibility.
The mysterious Tarim mummies of China’s western Xinjiang region are relics of a unique Bronze Age culture descended from Indigenous people, and not a remote branch of early Indo-Europeans, according to new genetic research.
The new study upends more than a century of assumptions about the origins of the prehistoric people of the Tarim Basin whose naturally preserved human remains, desiccated by the desert, suggested to many archaeologists that they were descended from Indo-Europeans who had migrated to the region from somewhere farther west before about 2000 B.C.
But the latest research shows that instead, they were a genetically isolated group seemingly unrelated to any neighboring peoples. Read more.
Pretty cool news (“descended entirely from Ancient North Eurasians” — not a genetic makeup found in anyone anymore), but also
a unique Bronze Age culture descended from Indigenous people, and not a remote branch of early Indo-Europeans
… please, journalists, how many times do we need to repeat? “Indo-European” is a linguistic and not a genetic or cultural category; this does not tell us basically anything about what language the Tarim mummy people might have spoken. (If anything, being able to assume a language shift along the way will probably make it easier to work out some plausible route for Tocharian to end up in the Tarim Basin.)
