Why do Sumerians and Chinese use "black headed people" in the exact same way?

Welcome everyone! This video is actually inspired by a comment from last week's video on how the Sumerians probably had the highest levels of basal Eurasian genetics. The commenter mentioned that in Tibet, even today, they use the term black-headed in a way very similar to the Sumerians. I really do read all the comments, and sometimes they don't amount to much, but I do have a whole list of things that I want to look into further, and this one got interesting as soon as I started pulling on this thread. There's a ton of papers on this, because the exact same wording, Lord of the Black-Headed People, is found from Sumer and throughout the Middle East, but also in China, Tangut, and Tibet. But it just kept getting deeper, that's why this video is so long. We're getting at the core of one of the most ancient myths, and it's tied up in power. Essentially, it becomes state propaganda, a worldview warfare being waged on the people. All these cultures have normal, everyday words for people or mankind, but when their ruler is reminding them that they are the Lord of the Black-Headed People, they're using that very specific term that's tied to the origin story of their rulership. Basically, it's saying, remember, the gods chose me, I'm not like you people. To go against me and my descendants is to go against the decrees of heaven. And so while Sumer and China seem so far off, it actually lines up perfectly with the Proto-Silk Road, which was already moving goods all across Eurasia by 1000 BC. So I hope you enjoy it. Like always, I'm pulling from a ton of peer-reviewed research. It's all linked down in the description. And this one goes in a ton of different directions, but I hope you'll see how it all comes together. I do want to focus on this paper for the video, which is focused on Tibet. I hope at the end of this, you just appreciate how far-reaching, odd, and specific this term was. That thousands of years apart, from the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Japan, the term black-headed people was how you describe the common people, mankind, while also meaning to evoke this poetic, mythic worldview. In China, the earliest hints of this appear in the Zhou Dynasty, around 1046-256 BC. The Shijing, or Book of Odes, and other early texts sometimes referred to the common people as, quote, black-haired folks. This phrase contrasted the ordinary populace with their dark hair against heaven or the ruling house. It was not casual vocabulary, there were other words for mankind and commoner, but it was the poetic shorthand, used to talk about people in a way that was connected to this myth. The Chinese character for Min, which means the people or commoners, is graphically derived from a sort of hieroglyph that's showing the eye being pierced or blinded. It's originally evoking the idea of subjugated captives, but later it gets generalized to just mean the masses, the common people, which is very dark and on the nose, very bold of their leadership, and I'll get into a lot more of this towards the end. By the time of the Qin Dynasty, from 221-206 BC, the expression had crystallized into a formal political label. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, adopted the term Xian Zhao, which is literally just two words put together that means black heads, and it becomes the official designation for his subjects. And I wanted to point out that this image is really useful. It's proof that at least by now, the idea that black-headed originally just meant something that they wear, some sort of hat, or just their black hair, well, this guy, the emperor, would probably kill you for calling him a black-headed one, while he has black hair and a black hat. I am sympathetic that the original Sumerian term may have just come from some sort of sheep or goat hat. Ironically, it's perfect for the whole theme of this video, that this Central Asian guy has a hat that looks just like the Sumerian one. But also one of the simpler ideas is just that it was black-headed people, black-skinned people, and so it's an endonym, a name the people of Sumer used to describe themselves, in contrast with the lighter-skinned people to the north, not fully white, but just not as deeply black as they were, but because their lords used the term lord of the black-headed people, once they were conquered by those northerners, the term could have evolved, and just been generalized to mean the sort of king, the sort of lord over the commoner, the farmers, the workers, something like that, as all Mesopotamian lords end up using this title, both the original dark-skinned lords of the black-headed ones, as well as the later light-skinned lords. They keep this prestigious title, and it could have just become a sort of ancient meme. Something that became abstracted to just mean a divine ruler set above the people. Because again, our Chinese emperor here would never be confused as a black-headed one, even though he has black facial hair, black hair on his head, and a black hat on his black hair. You would never call him a black-headed one, but you better understand that he was divinely chosen to rule over the common people. Inscriptions from his reign, like those preserved on standard weights, Here the phrase is clearly universal, it just means all the subjects, and it emphasized that the emperor was the son of heaven, while the Shanzhou were basically the commoners that he governed. And this symbolism worked on two levels. Nearly all Chinese people had black hair, but also black was the dynastic color of the Qin dynasty, reinforcing a unity of people under the black banner of the ruling house. The emperor is the head of his people, with the black banner, but of course, the black-haired Chinese people also literally have black heads, black hair. And keep this in mind for way later in the video, we'll come back to this. And then we have far to the northwest, in the Tangu Empire. Around 1038 to 1227 AD, their indigenous texts preserve a similar formula. They speak of, quote, the black-headed and the red-faced. Scholars debate what this pairing means. Some think that it marked different ethnic groups within Tangut society, others that it distinguished priestly or aristocratic elites from commoners, while others think it symbolized contrasting human types in a sort of mythic cosmology. Whatever its precise interpretation, the appearance of black-headed here is again not an everyday label for people, again, they have other words for people or commoners, but it's some sort of symbolic wording. While over in Japan, the expression never became a fixed political term, but it does appear in early poetry as a way of marking humanity. The Manyoshu, compiled around 759 AD, the great anthology of Nara period verse, contain lines that refer to, quote, black-haired folk, kurakami no hitobito. In this context, it means the people who live a mortal existence, so really all of mankind. Later Heian period, from 794 to 1185 AD, Wakka poetry also uses black hair in love poems and laments, where it's evoking youth, beauty, and the transience of life. To call people the black-haired was again not the normal words for people, but a poetic choice, meaning the average, mortal, earthbound humans. But again, our oldest came from China, and there is some convenient overlap here. If the Zhou dynasty was around 1000 BC, and we have Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions as late as the first millennia BC, which are using the same phrase, and we know kings continued to style themselves as, quote, shepherds of the black-headed, emphasizing their divine mandate to rule all mankind. We're seeing it so late in these people that were so connected to Sumer, that it overlaps with the rise of long-distance trade routes stretching from Mesopotamia across Central Asia and toward China. Already by the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, merchants, migrants, and emissaries moved between Mesopotamia, Iran, and the steppe corridors leading east. By the time of the Qin unification by the 3rd century BC, ideas, goods, and cosmological motifs were circulating all across Eurasia. Zoroastrianism had been around for at least 1000 years by now, and Buddhism for a few centuries. And you'll see a lot of what could be described as the Silk Road religion in this very pro-human flourishing traditions, which even if they end up supporting what we today would call a dictator, this absolute ruler was expected to take care of his people, to be a good shepherd who was described by how well he could treat his people. So though these places seem very far off on a map, and Sumer seems so ancient, the term lord of the black-headed people was being used at the time of this sort of global trade. I've seen some pushback in the comments that people just could have been describing everyone as black-haired, they're black-headed, and so everyone could just naturally describe their people that way. But I just really disagree. It's not just that they're similar, they're exactly the same, in all these different languages. It's just two words, black-headed. That Japanese example was a bit of an outlier and came a lot later, but for all these other ones, it's not black-haired, it's not dark eyes, it's not some other descriptor like being hairless or two-legged, it's not those with speech or tools, all these other things that could be used to describe humans as different from animals. And crucially, not all cultures around the world use this term. It's just these ones that were in heavy contact with each other, even if very distant contact from Sumer to China. It doesn't pop up in the Americas or Australia or in Central Africa, it's not just some way that humans seem to describe themselves. I and a lot of the researchers that study this do think it's a very specific term, and could be one of our greatest insights into the establishment of these cultures. And for good or bad, the establishment of a worldview that would control people up until today. So now let's actually jump into the paper that sparked this video. I'll be breaking this down part by part, and then zooming back out to the wider picture. Links are in the description. It was written in 2017 by Nathan W. Hill of Trinity College, Dublin, titled Come as Lord of the Black-Headed, an old Tibetan mythic formula. The paper is explaining the use of the very specific term, quote, Come as Lord of the Black-Headed, which appears in the Old Tibetan Chronicle, PT 1287, which dates from the late 8th to early 9th century CE, with the surviving manuscript copied in the 9th to early 10th century. That means the Tibetan usage of a formula like Lord of the Black-Headed is appearing roughly two and a half to three millennia after the first Sumerian and Akkadian uses. In Sumer, kings were already calling themselves, quote, King of the Black-Headed People, Lugol Sa-Giga, by the early dynastic period, around 2600 to 2500 BCE, like rulers like Enma Baragasi and Ayan-Natun. The Akkadians inherited and translated the phrase into the Semitic form, Shar-Nishe-Tesalmak-Kakadi. This was during the time of Sargon of Akkad and his successors, around 2300 BCE. In both Mesopotamian cases, the meaning is clearly Black-Headed People, not animals or anything else. And the structure is built from two words, Sumerian Sa-Giga and Akkadian Salmak-Kakadi. The Tibetan usage matches this same pattern. In PT 1287, the expression is Ngol-Ngak, with that M being kind of silent, a kind of aspirated Ng. So Ngol-Ngak. And literally, it is just two words meaning Black-Headed. Sumerian, you have Sa-Giga, where that extra Ga ending is just there to show that it's a descriptor of people. So although you could be pedantic and say, no, it's three words, it really is just two, Black-Head. The Tibetan version functions grammatically the same way, describing the people themselves. So when Tibetan scribes in Dunhuang were recording their royal mythic histories, they were using a phrase separated from the Mesopotamian precedents by nearly 3000 years, yet constructed and understood in almost the exact same way. I hope you see when I read some of these parts, that if I just switched out some of the names, if you didn't know this was from Tibet, I think you would just think it's from a Sumerian tablet. Quote, He came as lord. In birth, he was called, In death, they erected the tomb, He came in order to be the lord of the black-headed and upright men, and the owner of the manned and bent animals. In this case, the animals are usually yaks. We'll go through a ton more examples from other Tibetan texts in this paper, but what's common to all of them is that gods came down from heaven to earth to become lord, king, emperor, ruler of men, whatever you want to call it. A god comes down to become our king, and has a heavy focus on the importance of an unchanging lineage. One of the more complete passages reads thus, Quote, Saying, it is the center of the high snow mountains. The source of the great rivers. The highlands. The pure earth. He came from among the gods of heaven as the king of men. All the way up to the 14th century text, We get, quote, Because at that time, the men of Tibet had no ruler, And so Hill, the author of this paper, points out that this term, black-headed, go-nag, becomes a special term. Choosing that wording means you wanted to evoke the ancient myths, to remind the listener of the idea of those stories. The idea that a god came down to be the just leader of mankind. In the Denghuang document PT-0126, titled The Envoy of the Wa and Mu, the messengers of the Hua gods are trying to convince the lord of the Mu gods to, among other things, come to earth as the ruler of men. Which immediately reminded me of Enlil and his council. The Mesopotamian gods have more debate. It's less of an absolute lone ruler, like you think of with modern monotheism, or the earliest gods of Egypt, like Ta, who alone created all of existence through his speech. Instead, what we see in parts of the Bible, because it too is pulling from this shared Mesopotamian culture, is that there is a council of gods, and they're always plotting on something, they have different interests, even if one is supposed to be the head of the council, be it El, Enlil, or Yahweh. In this story from Tibet, it seems like the same idea. Hua decrees, The author stresses that the god must be convinced by these other gods, and just like how angel means messenger, these are described as Hua's messengers, urging the apparently more powerful god to descend to earth to help the black-headed and upright men, and even the animals. And this is followed by a disembodied voice that speaks to a council of Tibetan leaders on earth, who themselves you could see as a parallel, like above, so below kind of thing, that these sort of human leaders are like minor gods, but they don't have an overarching leader, no great god. And the voice that they hear says this, If the black-headed Tibetan people wish to have a ruler, on the seventh stage of heaven, the place of Mu, in a gold castle with a turquoise roof, there is a lord, Tribhargi Dhonsik, who is a descendant from the Hua gods, and a cousin of the Mu gods. Invite him to be your ruler. Now the gold and blue coloring of this castle, and the seven heavens, might also remind you of Mesopotamian themes as well. From gold and lapis lazuli from Babylon and Egypt, to the seven gates, seven sages, and seven heavens of Babylonian era texts, and of course to calling the gods down to be rulers of a certain people. And there's even a widespread idea of a negotiator, which fits for this region. Again, this Silk Road intersection, where you get this sort of Mithra-like character. The god Karma-Yoda would be a go-between to negotiate on behalf of the people, and Tribhargi Dhonsik. They have to try and convince him to come down, and we get, quote, to the six parts of the narrow earth, to serve as lord to the lordless black-headed men, and as authority over those manned animals without an authority. I just want to read this part of the paper from Hill, it says, quote, the epithet black-headed indicates mankind, particularly in its need of divinely descended political leadership, and in contrast to the manned yaks. And then we get a very curious passage, that the gods stress that there's a category difference between black-headed man and the gods, but despite protests against it, the two could marry. So it's not in the modern sense where we see them as almost immaterial. They're not disembodied spirits, they're worried about the risk that they could mate and have kids. The Bonpo ritual texts were a marriage liturgy. My daughter, Sidcham, will go from the gods to the gods. She is not made for black-headed man. The rising and the setting of the sun and moon takes place in the reel of the sky. Have you ever seen them fall down to the plane? We are the gods of the heavens. You are the black-headed earthworm. So while this heavenly lord was supposed to take care of mankind, when it came to mixing with one of the gods' own daughters, he is outraged and compares us to earthworms, showing a nasty little side to this. And then, and this is not connected directly, but it's just the next section covered, we get, quote, First, the one called Little Black-Headed Man is of a good origin since he was produced by the race of luminous gods. Adding that descriptor, little, is amazing since hominins were thought to be a lot shorter. All of them, even Neanderthals, are thought to be shorter in stature and all humans were far shorter in ancient times. I just really like that section. I don't know what to make of it. At a non-woo-woo level, it could just be civilized farming groups realizing more primitive people who lived out in nature, who were shorter, that must have been how they looked before this great boon of civilization, in their view that this high-tech society came as a benefit from a god that came down to help us. And still remember, they have other words for commoners, for people. They're specifically using black-headed people here to evoke that old myth. It's like an Egyptian saying we are the children of Re, or sons of Adam in Abrahamic faiths. In one sense, it does just mean mankind, but you're purposely not just using the word mankind. You're choosing those culturally specific phrases in order to make some point connected to those ancient stories. And another really interesting point is that like we saw in Europe with the retaining of pagan themes alongside early Christianity, the author points out how this ancient myth retains even when later layered over with Buddhist culture. Quote, Come from the gods as lord to upright and black-headed men, nobler than any kings of other kingdoms. The thought of his sacred majesty in his heart permeates and extends like the sky, his eternal word splendid and upright like Mount Meru, acting with exceeding love and compassion like the light of the sun and moon. He plants the stupa of the triple jewel for the benefit of the ages and opens the door of ambrosia of the sacred Dharma. And again, it's a bit sad how alien this sounds to us moderns, but the idea of a benevolent despot, most recently we had those enlightenment era ones, but these myths do enshrine the idea that by definition, being a true ruler means that the people were living good lives. It's almost the definition of this term. I think lord and king has a lot of baggage on it. Remember, even the Mesopotamian versions are sometimes just translated as shepherd. I think that does better match what they're going for here, a shepherd of the black-headed people. But the passage says, quote, The minister acted in the manner of earthly majesty, endowed with all the conditions of great majesty. They increased the outer polity in the four directions and the internal welfare was abundant and undiminished. They created parity between the high and the low among the black-headed subjects. They reduced tax fraud and created leisure. They swore oaths in the autumn and spring and adhered to this cycle. They gave to the needy and cut out the harmful. They employed the powerful and degraded the insolent. They quashed the frightened and allied with the truthful. They praised the wise and respected the heroic. They employed the devoted. The customs being good and the polity lofty, all men were happy. You could very easily see that coming out of the mouths of a Persian leader bragging about these Zoroastrian values. Not that they can be the only source of this, but this was a very healthy pro-humanity vision that we see flourishing all throughout the Axial Age, all across the Silk Road, that actually valued the happiness of the common people. And what comes next is very interesting. Ministers came close to harming the body of the emperor and the sun and put the polity of the black-headed Tibetans into strife. And here I really just want to quote the author of the paper here directly because it is very nuanced and critical. Quote, The use of the term black-headed in this passage emphasizes the need the Tibetans have for their ruler in the unnaturalness of the conspirators' crime. These associations would be absent if a different word for men had been used. In other words, they're saying the Ngo Nang, the black-headed people, to remind you of the mythic origin story of the emperor. Going against your lord was to go against the will of the gods. It wasn't just one man killing another. It was one man killing something like, at the very least, a demigod. But most important, it's going against the will of the gods. Our word hero we get from the Greek hēros, and it didn't just mean brave. It's kind of like a hybrid, a person with a divine heritage, be it just their own parent being a god or some distant ancestor. This was a category difference from normal mankind. And hēros comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ser or her, which means to protect, to watch over, or safeguard. And the same root is related to the Latin serare, which means to guard, keep. And it's also cognate with the English word ward. If you take some into your ward, you're in charge of protecting them. So from Sumer to China, we get this divine connected leader who has this special god-connected ancestry. And it's always connected to the imagery of them being a shepherd to the black-headed people, which were the normal, non-divine connected people in their kingdom. And I really love that the author of this paper points out that every time the ngōnag term is used over far later texts over different centuries, it's to my point of it functioning like saying the children of Adam. It is to reassert a type difference of ruler and subject. A Christian would know that there's a difference between us made of clay, descended from Adam, and the angels. And an ancient Greek would understand that their hero was a bit of a mix of both. And I can't help but be cynical and notice how like any great idea, even if it originally really was connected to human flourishing, it can just be a tool to control the people and make any disagreements an existential threat, an attack on the deepest of values, on the will of God. The author uses the German word Weltanschauung. You might see it simply defined as worldview, and that kinda works, but it misses the depth. It's like the programming reality of your mind. The deep framework of assumptions, values, and perceptions through which a person or a culture interprets reality. It's how they give meaning to life. It's more than just an opinion or philosophy, because it really does function like a mind in its own way. It's shaping how people see existence, history, morality, nature itself, and often destiny. But importantly, it's without them realizing it. For a comparison, if your whole complex biology gives rise to your individual mind, through which you then seem to process all other stimuli, to the point that you are completely unaware of all the minutia, all the pure biological inputs from the body in a literal mechanical sense, but these become mental models of pain, pleasure, or mundane thoughts, a Weltanschauung is the operating system or mass mind of a culture. Every little thing that happens in the particular is processed through this mental model. If philosophy is what people consciously think, then Weltanschauung is the ground that determines what they're able to think. The total structure of thought, feeling, and belief that even makes your worldview possible. I think for moderns it's sometimes hard to put ourselves in the mind of these ancient people, but we do think in terms of physics. As Yoda says, you must unlearn all that you have learned, because you don't think you can just lift a rock with your mind. You're not for or against it, it's not even a thought you have. Of course, some people do think they can do that. So maybe it's a bad example, but you get the point. It's things that we just take for granted. We see everything through the lens of this worldview. And so we can see how cynically you could have rulers that just wanted to remind people of this ancient myth so that they would not disobey the gods, i.e. you wouldn't disobey your lord. Weltanschauung's Krieg was used during World War II with Krieg meaning warfare, so it's worldview warfare. It's saying that Nazism, Communism, liberal democracy, Judaism, and Christianity, they were all fundamentally different operating systems on the mind. And they were at warfare with each other, trying to make the other ones go extinct. And the longer your brain ran on one, the harder it would be to get out of it. Almost certainly, rulers talked about this in the same sort of way about the issues of their time in ancient Sumerian and Chinese. And one of the oldest and most useful frameworks was that the gods chose a certain leader and intended his heirs to be the rulers of the black-headed common people. To be fair, the leader was by definition one that provided greatly to the people, so even if it was elitist, in a funny way, it can correct itself. You could almost prove that someone must not be actually divinely connected if they weren't able to provide for the people. And perhaps that fear is what we get with this next section that is still confusing scholars. It really reads like a prophecy with symbolic numbers and all, and it warns of an inversion of something that would go completely against this Weltanschauung. But notice, for you people interested in the phenotypes of these ancient people, some of the ideas I brought up in the last video about how the Basil Eurasians would have been far darker than their northern neighbors, because blackface is part of the black-headed description in this passage. It reads, quote, Now remember, this is written by people of Tibet, fiercely opposed to China, even today. So this is basically expressing the worst-case scenario. A black-faced, imposter, foreign king from China will come to rule over all of them and make them slaves. The exact opposite of a leader that the gods willed. A non-black-headed was intended to be a beneficent ruler over the black-headed people. But this warns of one who's so black-headed, he even has a black face, he's the one that rules, and if that happens, it means the subjects were in no way happy or thriving. But the exact opposite, reduced to slaves in this horrid time of inverted rulership. Now just to make sure people don't get the wrong idea here, I'm not trying to court some racial weirdos, even if you think this proves some racial angle. If we had a time machine and proved 100% it was light-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed conquerors descending from the Caucasus and steppe to become benevolent lords, increasing the quality of life for the black-headed people, I still don't get how that allows you to act superior today, even if you have some of those traits. Those lords would have millions of descendants by now. I try to laugh it off as just being silly, but I see it all the time, from white to black supremacists in the comments. My go-to is to say I don't get how you could think an entire race is great when you don't even like everybody in your own family. You may very well be a black or white gigachad who can trace their genes back to these great lords, but so can the guy stealing your catalytic converter while you're distracted watching this video. I just say that because any time you mention phenotypes on ancient people, the morphic field really does activate and these people swarm the comments, and there are points in this video that could be fuel for the white ones this time. Funny enough, a bunch of black supremacists actually really liked the last video. So I guess I'm doing something right. As someone who's just genuinely interested in all this, even if it eventually leads to me thinking that the Anunnaki deemed the Pacific Islanders as the chosen people. I don't care where it goes, I just have to laugh at how the racial silliness cuts both ways. It is admittedly a small minority, but they are very loud and annoying. But black supremacists were very happy that in the last video, I floated how the Sumerians likely had much darker skin, eyes, hair, and all that, compared to their northern neighbors. They would have got the lightning genes last. And they used the term black-headed, so it begs the question, black-headed opposed to what? But that cuts both ways if you want to say, yeah, that means they were literally just black people, because there are tons of other texts where the black-headed ones are separate and to be ruled over. It isn't crazy to think that the people saying that have lighter features, that lighter-skinned people were the rulers. Especially when all this is being encoded during the times of writing, which is around the same time we see the rapid spread of lightning alleles. This whole thing started with the mystery surrounding the term black-headed, that famous Sumerian endonym, or name for themselves. And I said that if you were an early king in Sumer, you yourself would have dark skin, and your people would have dark skin, and so you would say, I am the lord of the black-headed ones. If four to two thousand years later you're conquered by light-skinned, even blonde or blue-eyed people, that new leader would still say, I am the lord of the black-headed ones. What started as an endonym, and what could have also described the rulers at one time, could be retained to describe the common people, even if leadership changed. And especially it would have been reinforced if some of these lighter people did spread out and conquer and bring new tech with them. Along this proto-Silk Road transfer. This area at the center here, Central Asia, which is central to this whole story, from Egypt to China, this is exactly the area that had lighter skin, lighter hair, and lighter eyes first. Thousands of years before other areas. From the Bronze Age on, Central Asia was a corridor where populations from the Near East, the Iranian Plateau, and the Eurasian Steppe met and exchanged goods, genes, and ideas. Archaeology and ancient DNA both saw that alongside the overwhelmingly dark-haired and dark-eyed populations of East Asia, there were pockets of people with lighter skin, lighter hair, and sometimes blue or green eyes. Especially among the Indo-European speaking groups of the Steppe. These groups carried with them not only a distinct physical appearance, but new technologies, like wheeled vehicles, chariot warfare, advanced metallurgy, and horse husbandry, which would all profoundly influence societies to their east. The earliest wave relevant here is the Afanasevo culture, around 3300 to 2500 BCE, located in the Altai region of southern Siberia. Ancient DNA shows that the Afanasevo were genetically close to the Amnaea of the Western Steppe, people with a higher frequency of alleles associated with lighter skin and sometimes lighter eyes. They were the first to bring a pastoralist, steppe-based economy deep into Asia, and many scholars believe they were carriers of early Indo-European languages. Though their genetic signatures fade in later populations of the region, and there are people like the Aene, who had almost no admixture, while still taking on cultural influences from east and west, I did a whole video on them if you want to check it out. But it's the wheeled vehicles and animal husbandry from the west that seemed the most impactful. A more direct link comes with the Andronovo horizon, around 2000 to 1500 BCE, which spread across much of Central Asia, including areas just north of the Tibetan Plateau. The Andronovo people practiced advanced metallurgy, chariot warfare, and even more organized pastoralism. Ancient DNA again shows a strong western Eurasian signal, with features including lighter pigmentation traits at slightly higher frequencies than in East Asians. These communities likely encountered and sometimes merged with indigenous Siberian and Central Asian groups, creating many mixed populations. Their spread eastward is a plausible vector for transmitting both technology and mythic motifs from the Near East and Mesopotamia into the spheres that bordered China. I also did a whole video on the Tarim Basin mummies, from around 2000 to 500 BCE, discovered in what is now Xinjiang, western China. Many of these naturally preserved mummies have blonde or reddish hair, high nose bridges, and sometimes blue eyes. Features consistent with their western Eurasian genetic ancestry. Everyone was surprised to find that the earliest Tarim groups were that A&E population, who were isolated for tens of thousands of years, but by the first millennium BCE, they were engaging in extensive trade across the Proto-Silk Road. They wore woolen textiles that were influenced from the west, they carried wheat and barley, which was originally domesticated in Mesopotamia, and practiced dairying. They had cheeses that were from breeds of cattle which were first domesticated in Mesopotamia. We know for sure that technologies like domesticated animals, plants, and textiles all traveled from Mesopotamia all the way over to modern China. Also in this first millennium BCE, which remember is when we see the Zhou Dynasty pop up, you have steppe confederations like the Scythians, Saka, and Wusong, who were described as having blue or green eyes and red hair. These classical Chinese records match up with modern genetics. These groups were skilled horsemen and traders, and their mobility allowed them to act as cultural brokers, carrying technology and ideas to these far off areas. It's very reasonable to think that these ancient myths are a memory of something that could be connected to these people, who had both better war technology, but also once they conquered you, they knew about all that city dweller tech too, like making rows of barley and grain. They wanted to, they could just copy how everyone was living in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Maybe they were good rulers, maybe they weren't, and later rulers just realized it was wise to keep the people happy, and definitely at least good to tell them that you were trying to serve them, as you were increasingly outnumbered by all these people that were able to survive off all these grains. Again, the overall point is that this all could have been retained in this mythological framework. Because there is another odd thing that happens in this same area that started this story. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, texts and art show that elites sometimes used henna or mineral based powders to change hair color or lighten skin tone. Babylonian and Assyrian elites occasionally bleached or dyed their beards and hair, while Egyptians used wigs made of lighter fibers or animal hairs. For some reason in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a way to signal your elite status, your otherness, your said aboveness, or even your divine descent was to lighten your features. Now I see some black supremacists choosing to dye on a very silly hill, because yes, people did lighten their hair this way, they did it artificially, but we also do find red-haired Egyptian mummies and the red-haired mummies of China. But again, remember, I'm the one saying that Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies were established long before the spread of light skin alleles. I don't think people that looked white established ancient Egypt or ancient Sumer. But I do think something happened. The most likely is that you see this explosion in warfare technology and domestication technology at the same time we get light skin alleles spreading. And so at some point, phenotypically lighter people took over. Probably a mix of violent conquest and peaceful trade and cultural diffusion. And this does also even happen in Europe. Even in Greece and Rome, where lighter hair did occur naturally at higher frequencies in Mesopotamia or China, the elites still sought to accentuate it. Ancient sources note that Roman women commonly bleached or dyed their hair blonde using lye, saffron, or imported wigs made from the hair of Germanic captives. In Homeric poetry, the heroes like Achilles and Menelaus are described as xanthos, fair, golden-haired. There are tons of red-haired people throughout who have grey-eyed Athena. And so some academics say fair didn't necessarily mean blonde, but come on, golden hair does. And again, like we saw in Egypt and Mesopotamia, it's connected to this luminous, elevated appearance. Fairness was not about just beauty, but it's like this new old-money trend in fashion. You're trying to seem of an upper class. Fairness wasn't a look, but connected to nobility. And again, these heroes who were semi-divine. There's a visual difference from the far more common black-headed people. And to tie it back to China, specifically the Han Dynasty historian Sima Xiong describes the Wusun as having red hair and blue eyes, and that in these stories there's a connotation of strangeness, power, and even that this may be caused by the spirits, some supernatural ancestry. I don't think mainstream scientists would like to just put it this bluntly with the framing, because the annoying, actual white racists do run with this, and think that it makes them special today. But the mainstream and best argument for the rapid spread of blue eyes almost all of the university academics who study this, say that despite having no advantage, or maybe even a slight disadvantage, blue eyes spread so fast just because they look cool. No natural selection, just sexual selection. Human preference. And in a world view where nothing really happens by accident, everything's the choice of the gods. From winning a war, to birth defects, when this random mutation took hold, it was sexually selected for. Kinda hard to think that they didn't tack on some meaning to it. They likely thought that this uniqueness meant specialness, somehow chosen by the gods. By the Iron Age and into the classical world, it was a wrap. Mimicking lighter features became a widespread cultural phenomenon. Mesopotamian elites were tinting their hair, Roman women were bleaching theirs, even people in central and northern Europe, who would have a higher rate of natural blondes, famously the Celts used to dye their hair with lye, making it very white blonde. People in Chinese and English courts, a millennia later were powdering their faces to appear paler. Even if by now everybody had the lighter phenotypes, and now it was more to show that you didn't work outside, you weren't a day laborer but a noble person, it goes to the main point that it parallels for the same reason. The Chinese and Tibetan myths are not pulling directly from Sumer, but the core point in worldview is the same. It's very plausible that some of the awe or reverence surrounding foreign rulers, who in myth might be described as descending from heaven, with what could be described as these god-given visual differences, and this miraculous new technology that was such a boon to the people. You can see that all morphing to become a tale of how they were supposed to govern the black-headed people. Originally inspired by seeing people who just look so different. While this framework and some of these specific terms like black-headed stick around long after this original spread, even when those phenotypically lighter people were no longer in control, even when those lords were just of the same people group as the people they ruled, they did just look like their subjects, the mythological framework and the epithet that reminds your people that you were divinely chosen by God, that's what sticks for millennia. Thanks for watching!