Now that we have looked at the DNA of the Tarim Basin mummies, when is somebody going to do the same for the mummies found at Paracasa, Peru? I know that anyone who is interested in them is considered a crank or a racist, but dammit--they do look very Caucasian. The hair is not just just light colored, but very fine and wavy in texture. The funerary masks sometimes have blue-colored stones embedded in them to represent the eyes.
If they do turn out to be Caucasian, it could be the biggest story in anthropology in a century. They could be a remnant population of our paleolithic ancestors if the Folsom/Solutrean hypothesis is true. Or if they are more recent arrivals, they could show some affinities for some still extant population. Greeks, Romans, wandering Irishmen? Who knows? I don't have any axe to grind in this, I just want to know where such unusual looking people came from.
There has been some ancient DNA work on ancient Paracas culture mummies, Dienekes wrote about this a little bit last year:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/07/mtdna-from-pre-columbian-peru.html
..and I found a few more references. There are none but the usual South American mtDNA haplogroups, but that leaves quite a bit of uncertainty about the relationships of the ancient and living populations, which apparently differ substantially in frequency. The same is true in Europe between Neolithic and recent samples. Whole-genome sequencing will be very interesting, not least because the South Americans should have different recent selection histories compared to Old World populations.
