Tarim Mummies- Out of Place

During an excavation beneath the Tarim Basin of western China, archaeologists were surprised to discover more than 100 mummified corpses that dated back 2000 years. But Victor Mair, a college professor, was downright stupefied when he came skull-to-skull with some of the blond-haired and long nosed Tarim mummies. So in 1993, Mair returned to collect DNA samples and test results to validate his hunch that the bodies were of European genetic stock. While Ancient Chinese texts from as early as the first millennium BC do describe groups of far-east dwelling Caucasian people, there is no mention of how or why these people ended up there.