The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/world/asia/19mummy.html?_r=1

According to Edward Wong of the New York Times, a mummy find of global significance is challenging the master narrative of the peopling of China:

"One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese."

The "Tarim mummies" on display at a museum in Urumqi, China, might indicate that a certain sometimes contested area of China was settled by people from the west rather than people from China's interior. The older mummy is 3,800 years old. Ancestors of the people from the west are taking this idea and using it to argue that "Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history."

"What is indisputable is that the Tarim mummies are among the greatest recent archaeological finds in China, perhaps the world" Wong reports that scientists have not been permitted to perform genetic testing on these mummies, due in part to the fact that the evidence they present, by way of complicating settled histories of the peopling of China, will challenge the status quo.

This controversy in China reminds me of that surrounding the Kennewic Man in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man