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  Quartz in these travertine deposits can be dated with some accuracy, and these prints are believed to be around twenty thousand years old. At other sites across the Tibetan plateau, stone tools have been found which, while they cannot be dated, are believed to be even older than the Chusang prints. It was clear that what was known about early Tibet from an archaeological record dating back at least twenty thousand years didn’t match claims from geneticists about a much more recent divergence from China’s population. Could they be different groups of people? Perhaps the warmer and wetter climate these early settlers enjoyed grew colder and more arid as the last ‘ice age’, more accurately the Last Glacial Maximum, approached twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps whoever it was living on the plateau had migrated or died, to be replaced by new migrants from China as the plateau warmed again some ten thousand years ago.

  In the last few years, this fragmentary picture has filled out considerably, with new and more robust genetic research filling in many gaps, supported by new archaeological discoveries, particularly at the oldest site found so far, on the banks of the Salween river in south-east Tibet. Here stone tools and animal remains have been dated to between thirty-one and thirty-eight thousand years ago. Not only does this new work support the idea that Tibetans have been settled on the plateau for tens of thousands of years, it also fits new genetic evidence that their presence was continuous, despite the worsening climate of the last glacial period. This evidence has some startling implications for our species as a whole.

  In 2014, BGI published new research on genetic sequences of Tibetans they had looked at previously, this time comparing them with the same sequences from a wide range of modern and archaic humans. The results were startling. A sequence they had previously identified as significantly different from those of lowlander populations was found in only one other sample: that of the archaic human species dubbed Denisovan. Until recently, we had only the little finger bone of one individual of this hominin, found in a cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia. The bone belonged to a girl who lived 41,000 years ago, when different human subspecies lived side by side. Sequencing her genome has shown that Denisovans had interbred with Neanderthals. Now it appeared modern humans had as well. In 2019, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig published a paper on a second Denisovan find: a jawbone found in a cave in Gansu province, placing Denisovans on the Tibetan plateau itself.

  In September 2016, a team from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences published research that made a broader and deeper analysis of Tibetan DNA. They were the first researchers to sequence the entire genome of a Tibetan, in fact thirty-eight of them, including Sherpas. They then compared the results with the entire genomes of Han Chinese and with available genetic data from other modern and archaic humans. Their results showed that around six per cent of the Tibetan gene pool was composed of archaic sequences, including the Denisovan DNA found previously. That’s substantially more than the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans. They also found a segment that connected Tibetans to a modern human population living in Siberia 45,000 years ago, the so-called Ust’-Ishim man, whose fossilised thighbone gave up sufficient genetic material for the genome to be sequenced. As it turns out, Tibetans have more genetic material in common with Ust’-Ishim than any other modern population, including modern Siberians. They concluded that the earliest Tibetan settlers carried the genes of all three hominins, that Tibetans had arrived on the plateau between sixty-two and thirty-eight thousand years ago, but that the bulk of their genes was far more modern, around twelve to ten thousand years old, as the last glacial period ended.

  The complexity of these discoveries has allowed a fuller, though far from complete, story of the settlement of the Tibetan plateau to emerge. Having migrated from North Asia and settled on the plateau during the Palaeolithic, Tibet’s human population, surviving at high altitude for hundreds of generations, faced twenty thousand years ago the brutal prospect of a cooling climate. It was once thought the plateau was covered in ice during the Last Glacial Maximum but this is now discounted. While the plateau has an average altitude of over four and a half kilometres, there are many places less exposed and somewhat lower in altitude where populations could survive, such as the big river valleys. No doubt many groups migrated or died out, but some remained in these sheltered sanctuaries. When the climate became warmer and less arid again, plant and animal species extended their range once more across the plateau. Neolithic populations, speaking proto-Tibeto-Burmese languages, migrated from the upper Yangtze river in modern Sichuan and from the more northerly province of Gansu onto the Tibetan plateau where they encountered small indigenous bands with a very particular genetic inheritance. Far greater in number, these new arrivals interbred with the existing population and acquired those genes that conferred the biggest advantage: the ability to live and successfully reproduce in a hypoxic environment.

  Western writers are sometimes guilty of romanticising the links between Tibetan culture and the physical environment, but it’s true to say that Tibet’s high altitude has had a profound impact not just on Tibetan physiology but on its history too. Until the twentieth century, when China used modern warfare, technology and infrastructure to extend its reach permanently to the northern edge of the Himalaya, the genetic adaptation to altitude Tibetans enjoyed was their greatest defence. Tibet experienced invasions from lowlanders over the centuries, but maintaining a permanent presence required more resources from the invaders than the rewards justified; the hardships of life at high altitude were too unpalatable. In the course of Tibetan history, several foreign armies would struggle to feed themselves.

  What Tibet had to offer could be acquired more easily through trade, which was vibrant and transformative. Culture and ideas, Buddhism for example, could and did flow uphill to high altitude. The notion of a mythical, isolated Tibet is just that: a myth. As historian Sam van Schaik wrote, Tibet has been ‘deeply involved with other cultures throughout its history’. For actual living people, though, such involvement was harder. Permanent occupation by a lowland population, specifically Han Chinese, has required modern obstetrics and a determined, often ruthless political will. Even now, the infant mortality rate for Han Chinese here is three times the rate for Tibetans.

  If the Tibetan genome tells an eloquent story, the archaeological record of how Tibet emerged from the last ‘ice age’ ten thousand years ago is sparse. Almost all the earliest sites whose age have been measured date from around five thousand years ago, mostly along the eastern margins of the plateau but some in what would become the first crucible of historic Tibetan identity, the Yarlung Tsangpo valley, very much in the Himalayan region. Before that, there are little more than hints, assemblages of stone tools that suggest cultural differences, particularly between south Tibet and the arid, rolling hills of the Chang Tang in the north, where people have historically and through necessity been more nomadic. The idea of different cultures on the plateau is important. In the popular imagination, Tibet and Buddhism are synonymous. The Dalai Lama’s high profile in exile and his place at the centre of Tibetan identity make that assumption inevitable. But Buddhism wasn’t first established in Tibet until the seventh and eighth centuries, long after Christianity arrived in Europe and more than a thousand years after the Buddha lived. It was draped, like sheer fabric, over the complex and varied cultures that had developed and endured for centuries. With Buddhism came literacy; before Buddhism there was no Tibetan script. This watershed moment has dominated not just Western understanding of Tibet but Tibet’s sense of itself: creating a narrative from a voiceless world requires considerable ingenuity.

  The earliest known Neolithic culture on the Tibetan plateau is found at its easternmost edge near Chamdo, third largest city in the Tibet Autonomous Region and close to the border with China’s Sichuan province. Kharub, often Sinicised to Karou, is a collection of domestic residences representing several periods of occupation between six and four t
housand years ago. The later structures excavated at Kharub look, at least from the interpretation of Chinese archaeologists, remarkably similar to a vernacular still common throughout rural Tibet. The site is on a bench above the Dza Chu river, which becomes the Mekong, at around 3,100 metres. As well as remains of wild goats and deer and evidence of foraging, there’s evidence that millet was cultivated at Kharub and that people there experimented to achieve the best yields in the thin air of high altitude, where it’s possible to grow only a narrow selection of cereal crops. There’s evidence too of domesticated pigs.

  Another site further west, Chugong, on the north side of Lhasa’s Kyi Chu valley, is up to four thousand years old and also shows evidence of animal husbandry, including yak, which evolved, like Tibetans themselves, to prosper at high altitude. Yaks are a totemic creature in Tibetan culture, but until Chugong the first evidence of them in this area came from much later, in a document from the Western Zhou dynasty dating from 850 BCE. Tibetans learned to use every part of the yak productively, as Inuit do the seal, its bones carved into buttons or combs, the characteristic yak belly fringe providing the best hair for tent ropes. Yak tails were of particular value and were traded cross the Himalaya and far beyond. Roman women were using yak-hair flywhisks at the time of the Emperor Domitian in the first century. In south-western Tibet, the Mahabharata describes trade from Tibet in gold and precious stones; it’s inconceivable that goods and technologies didn’t travel the other way, into Tibet from neighbouring regions on the other side of the Himalaya: Kinnaur and Garhwal, and across Ladakh to the plateau. This region of Tibet acquired domesticated crops in this way, especially wheat, barley and peas, but the archaeology here is even scarcer than in the east. In north-western Tibet, archaeological finds suggest the influence of pre-Scythian tribes, the culture of the steppe extending to the plateau, of which more later.

  A huge number and variety of objects were recovered from Kharub, ceramic bowls and jars with geometric patterns, polished stone and exquisite bone tools: awls and needles, weaving tools and combs. There were plenty of decorative objects too, including jade pins, shells and perforated stone jewellery. These and artefacts from Chugong are on display at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa. One of the exhibits from Kharub stopped me in my tracks when I saw it for myself: a series of nine semi-precious stones strung together and featuring a malachite pendant. There was also a polished cylindrical bead of turquoise, and another of what looked like jade, perhaps from ancient mines in the Tarim basin. There was no interpretation on the exhibit but what it illustrated was obvious: cultural continuity between the ancient past and the present. In the seventh century, for example, according to Chinese chronicles, the rank of Tibetan ministers could be judged from their insignia: different-sized beads hanging from string at their shoulders. The most precious, more than gold or silver, was turquoise. Nothing has changed. The fragments in the museum echo a motif and style that fills the shop windows of jewellery stores in modern Lhasa. Plenty of cultures revisit prehistoric art for inspiration; in Tibet it never went away.

  As with writing, Buddhism marked a watershed in Tibet’s artistic traditions. When we think of Tibetan art, it’s most probably the complex and beautiful murals and elegant statuary of Tibetan Buddhism, which date back as far as the eighth century. This tradition drew its aesthetic from India, particularly from the Buddhist centres of the Pala dynasty in Bengal and Kashmir. Its arrival in Tibet reflected a sea change in religious practice and political power. What preceded it was radically different: the art of the people, not religious specialists, reflecting a kind of everyday spiritual awareness that mediated the worlds of hunting and pastoralism. Its inspirations were local gods and the rituals of the passing seasons.

  Tibet’s rock art offers the most immediate insights into this preliterate culture. The museum has plenty of examples on display. The most popular figurative subjects, commonly painted in red ochre, or tsak, were wild animals, particularly ungulates: yaks, complete with belly fringe, and deer, the two most commonly featured species and both widely present as keystones in the shamanistic spirit world that predated Buddhism. Predators also featured: tigers and lions. The natural world is a central theme, as you would expect when survival depends on it. There are pictographs of hunters on horseback drawing bows, sitting on saddles that are similar in style to ones still used on the Tibetan plateau, although stirrups arrived only with the Turkic tribes in the fifth century.

  Cosmological symbols are also common: the sun and moon, but also the swastika in both its clockwise and counterclockwise form, which appeared in the Indus valley fifteen hundred years before the Buddha was born. Many of these symbols were absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism, just as animistic totems were into the early Christian church. They feature in thangkas, Buddhist religious paintings, alongside srungma, protective spirits that are distinctive to Tibetan Buddhism. The meaning of this iconography evolved as Tibet itself changed but the process of recruiting to Buddhism the symbols and rituals of a pre-existing system of belief is clear. Some aspects were undoubtedly lost, though: pre-Buddhist imagery sometimes shows arrows jutting from the flanks of wild yaks, not a scene repeated in Buddhist iconography, with hunting frowned upon. Others may be rooted in this preliterate art, for example gods riding on yaks. The discovery of the earliest thangkas painted with red ochre in the Mogao Caves on the Silk Road hints at the continuity from Tibet’s preliterate view of the universe to a wholly new one based on Buddhist philosophy. The old world was full of demons and visions; the new was austere and thoughtful. Tension between them has remained a constant and often creative dynamic in Tibetan culture and religious practice ever since.

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  Documents found in the Mogao Caves, the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, dominate our understanding of early Tibetan history, like a welcome landmark emerging from the mist. The caves are near Dunhuang, far to the north of the Himalaya, on the edge of the Gobi desert in what is now Gansu province. Dunhuang was a Han dynasty garrison that became a supply point for camel trains on the Silk Road, a junction between its northern and southern routes, and a crossroads for travellers between Mongolia and India. It was a Buddhist city by the fourth century, with a population of tens of thousands, when the first caves were dug at Mogao, elaborately painted with visual aids to meditation and paid for by wealthy patrons. The site was a major Chinese Buddhist centre during the Tang dynasty, at its height in the eighth and ninth centuries, by which time hundreds of caves had been dug and decorated; its Buddhist priests escaped persecution after the Tang turned against foreign religions in the 840s only because the city was by then a possession of the Tibetan Empire. As Islam conquered much of Central Asia, the caves were abandoned. When the Yuan dynasty, patrons of Tibetan Buddhism, collapsed in the fourteenth century, the city itself went into decline. Growth in sea trade had fatally weakened the Silk Roads, until President Xi Jinping revived the idea in the twenty-first century.

  Even after much of the complex was abandoned, though, Mogao remained a site of worship. In the late nineteenth century, Wang Yuanlu, an itinerant Taoist monk from Shanxi province, settled there and became the site’s unofficial guardian, raising money for restoration. In 1900, as workmen he’d hired were clearing sand from the entrance to one cave they discovered a hidden door to another. This cave was filled with thousands of ancient documents, the youngest of which dated from the early eleventh century. Excavated as a memorial chapel for a monk called Hongbian who died in the ninth century, it is now better known as the Library Cave. The reason it was walled off with documents hidden inside has intrigued scholars. One explanation is that this was an attempt to hide them from invaders at the time of the defeat of the nearby Buddhist Khotan kingdom in 1006 at the hands of the Muslim Karakhanids. (‘We came down on them like a flood,’ wrote the Turkic scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari. ‘We went out among their cities, / We tore down the idol-temples, / We shat on the Buddha’s head!’) Khotan had been a Buddhist kingdom for more than a thousand years, dating back to the ti
me of the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashok and the Greeks in Central Asia. By the end of the eleventh century, Khotanese had been almost entirely replaced by the Turkic language of their conquerors. When Marco Polo visited in the late thirteenth century, he reported that all Khotan’s inhabitants were Muslim.

  Wang Yuanglu made repeated attempts to interest local Chinese authorities in his discovery but various officials who saw documents from the Library Cave failed to understand their significance. In 1907, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein visited Dunhuang with his capable interpreter and secretary Jiang Xiaowan. Stein’s description of the cave hints at the riches inside: he estimated 230 bundles of Chinese scrolls and 80 Tibetan bundles, each containing around a dozen scrolls. He counted eleven large volumes of Tibetan pothi-style books, narrowly rectangular in shape and loosely bound, between traditional wooden covers. The pile of manuscripts and scrolls was ten feet high and occupied a space of five hundred square feet. The papers had no catalogue and were often scrambled together.