In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. Multimedia Map Small River Cemetery Science Times Podcast Science Twitter Logo. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Wang Da-Gang WELL PRESERVED The mummy of an infant was one of about 200 corpses with European features that were excavated from the cemetery. Enlarge This Image Wang Da-Gang A 3,800-year-old mummy, the Beauty of Xiaohe, found at the Small River Cemetery. Enlarge This Image Many of the women buried there wore string undergarments like the one in this drawing. Enlarge This Image Wang Da-Gang Readers’ Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (78) » The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation. The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke. Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders. In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han. The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin. The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA. Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author. All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago. The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin. As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand. At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women. Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine. In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols. The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility. Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said. Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods. Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said. Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe. There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site. The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago. The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam). The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D. An exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. — the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia. An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Xinjiang as a province rather than an autonomous region.

Aaron E. Putnam, George H. Denton Collaborators: Wally Broecker and Joerg Schaefer (Columbia University), David E. Putnam and Chunzeng Wang (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Peter and Fred Quesada (Fore River Company) We ventured to Central Asia as a part of our global effort to resolve patterns of worldwide mountain glaciation since the last ice age. Major questions of climate dynamics are: (1) What causes global glacial cycles? (2) When Earth was most firmly in the grip of an ice age, why did it suddenly come to an end? The abrupt end of the last ice age is called the ‘last glacial termination’, and constitutes the great global warming of the last 100,000 yrs. Understanding ice ages and their terminations is essential for identifying the basic processes driving Earth’s climate today, and offers a key benchmark against which predictive climate models can be calibrated. Our goal is to determine how climate in both polar hemispheres was linked during the last ice age and the last glacial termination (see also our expedition pages covering our work on this subject in New Zealand and the Western United States). Very little is known about the glacial history of remote Central Asia, which lies on the opposite side of the Northern Hemisphere from the North Atlantic region and on the other side of the planet from our field sites in New Zealand and southern South America, and thus presents an opportunity to unravel climate linkages across these vast distances. In addition to studying the history of Earth’s glaciers, we are also interested in global patterns of past rainfall to gain insight into how Earth’s wind belts and monsoons have changed since the last ice age. This hydrological information goes hand-in-hand with the glacial record to allow a comprehensive reconstruction of the global climate system since the last glacial cycle, as well as during abrupt climate events that have occurred since the last ice age. Of equal importance is to acquire knowledge regarding the predicted response of human societies to Central Asian water availability to ongoing climate change and a warming world. Current predictions are highly uncertain as different climate models yield conflicting results. Because Central Asian societies receive most of their water from melting mountain ice and snow, empirical constraints on the relationship between water availability and past climate changes are essential to assess impacts of current and future climate changes on irrigation, agriculture and livestock in the dry latitudes of Central Asia today. We use glacial geochronology to reconstruct the history of Earth’s glaciers, which can then be used to infer patterns of past temperature changes. In particular, we use a revolutionary new dating method called ‘10Be surface-exposure dating’. This method relies on the buildup of ‘cosmogenic nuclides’ in quartz minerals found in rocks. This build-up is a consequence of cosmic ray bombardment, and cosmic rays can only bombard a rock’s surface when that surface is exposed to the sky. Thus, the number of cosmogenic atoms can be measured and the time since that surface was exposed to the sky can be quantified. Recent analytical improvements now allow us to date rock surfaces with a high level of accuracy. Using the 10Be method, we targeted a classic system of terminal moraines (mounds of debris deposited by the tongue of a previously enlarged glacier) along the southern flank of the Tien Shan, on the northern rim of the great Taklamakan Desert. In addition to sampling moraine boulders to reconstruct glacial history, we surveyed the landscape in and around the Taklamakan Desert where we discovered geological and biological evidence indicating that regions that are now desert were much wetter in the past. Understanding the hydrology of this part of Asia has not only implications for understanding global climate dynamics, but is also very important for being able to evaluate how water availability might change as the globe warms due to rising atmospheric CO2. Thus we collected samples for radiocarbon dating that shed light on a time when a vastly different climate existed in the Tarim Basin from that we know today. We hope that by knowing when these water-loving animals and plants grew, we can place the hydrological history of Central Asia into a global palaeoclimatic context and ultimately unravel how water availability in this region will respond to future climate change, and how quickly some of these changes might occur.

There could be an “ocean” hidden under one of the driest areas on earth, according to a breakthrough discovery by Chinese scientists. The amount of salt water beneath the Tarim basin in northwestern Xinjiang province could be equivalent to 10 times the water in all five Great Lakes in North America. “This is a terrifying amount of water,” said professor Li Yan, who led the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. “Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand. Our definition of desert may have to change,” he said. The Tarim is the world’s largest landlocked basin and home to Taklimakan, the biggest desert in China. The basin is known for its rich oil reserves, but to access them requires large amounts of water. For a long time scientists had suspected that melt water from high mountains nearby had sipped beneath the basin, but the exact amount of water reserves there remained unknown. Precise estimates are difficult because surface water in the region, such as seasonal rivers and lakes appear at random times in inconsistent locations, making direct measurement impossible. Li’s team stumbled on the discovery by accident. “We were after carbon, not water,” he said. Greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be absorbed in certain regions known as "carbon sinks", such as forests and oceans. Locating these sinks may help scientists better understand climate change. Around 10 years ago, Li’s team discovered large amounts of carbon dioxide disappearing in Tarim, with no explanation over where it could be going. In a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Li’s team reported that there could be a large amount of water under earth's largest deserts which serve as carbon sinks as important as forests and oceans. Under the Tarim desert, over a depth stretching thousands of metres, exists an enormous amount of saline water fll of carbon dioxide, they found. The team obtained deep underground water samples from nearly 200 locations across the desert. By measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in these samples, and comparing them to the carbon dioxide in melt water, the scientists were able to calculate how much water had flown into the basin. “Our estimate is a conservative figure. The actual amount could be larger,” Li said. Melt water has been used by people in Xinjiang for agricultural irrigation for thousands of years. The soil of farmland in the region is alkaline, helping the dissolving of carbon dioxide into the water. By dating the age of the carbon Li's team "recorded a jump of 'carbon sinking' after the opening of the ancient Silk Road more than two thousand years ago." “CCS [carbon capture and storage] is a 21st century idea, but our ancestors may have been doing it unconsciously for thousands of years," he said. However, Li emphasised that the "ocean" under Tarim would not be much immediate use for Xinjiang's economic development. The water is not just salty, but contains a large amount of carbon dioxide. “It’s like a can of coke. If it is opened all the greenhouse gas will escape into the atmosphere,” he said. The biggest question now is whether similar “oceans” can be also be found under other large deserts, such as Sahara. Li said they would work with research teams around the world to find out the answer. The chance of water under these deserts is high because the amount of carbon these “oceans” carried could reach a trillion tonnes, which matches the amount of “missing carbon” on the planet, according to Li's team's calculations.