Anthropology.net

Cultural anthropology specializes in many aspects of explaining who, what, where, why, and how people live the ways they do. Cultural anthropologists identify unique traits of a certain culture, or way of life. We as a public usually draw the lines between the similarities and differences to our own cultures and the ones introduced to us by the cultural anthropologists.

One example of such work came out in 1964, by Hajime Nakamura, who wrote the book, “Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples.” This text is full of comparative works showing the similarities and contrasts between Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese cultures and modes of thought. It still remains a classic. Dr. Nakamura toned his book on comparing and contrasting creation myths; stories of explaining how the world came to be from each respective culture’s points of view.

And that’s what I want to introduce to you in this post: creation myths. What is not unique to just one culture is that every culture that comes to my mind has a creation myth. While each story may be completely original and unique in its own right when compared to one another, the fact that it is a creation myth remains a connecting force across cultures, times, and places.

For example, the Maya have the Popol Vuh, or story where the creation of humans is attributed to the three water-dwelling feathered serpents who first made emotionless wooden humans and then destroyed them and casted them down to humans.

Sounds like a pretty crazy story at first.

But take a moment and ask yourself, “What similarities do I see in this story to say the Judeo-Christian creation story — the one where God made humans out of clay”

You’ll begin to see that even some creation myths, as outlandish as they may seem, have some similarities here and there. Many creation myths from the Middle East and adjacent areas have these types similarities as well. The most notable is the role of a virgin mother figure, who beared a son by not having sexual intercourse with a divine being and remaining a virgin. Biologically, this is impossible to humans — but it seemed prevalent enough that this certain substory shows its face in both the Judeo-Christian story, i.e. the origins of Jesus Christ and also in Buddha’s origins.

And with that, I realize I’m digressing. What I really wanted to share with you, is something I stumbled up on Digg , LiveScience’s collection of the ‘top 10′ creation myths. I really don’t get how they determined the top ranking but it is a nice little quick introductory comparison of ten different creation myths. My personal favorite is number three on the list, the Hindu Cosmology’s Rendezvous with Brahma,

“The Hindu cosmology contains many myths of creation, and the principal players have risen and fallen in importance over the centuries. The earliest Vedic text, the Rig Veda, tells of a gigantic being, Purusha, possessing a thousand heads, eyes, and feet. He enveloped the earth, extending beyond it by the space of ten fingers. When the gods sacrificed Purusha, his body produced clarified butter, which engendered the birds and animals. His body parts transformed into the world’s elements, and the gods Agni, Vayu, and Indra. Also, the four castes of Hindu society were created from his body: the priests, warriors, general populace, and the servants. Historically later, the trinity of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer) gained prominence. Brahma appears in a lotus sprouting from the navel of the sleeping Vishnu. Brahma creates the universe, which lasts for one of his days, or 4.32 billion years. Then Shiva destroys the universe and the cycle restarts. Relax everybody, the current cycle has a couple billion years left.”

You may also be interested in Ahura Mazda in Persian creation mythology — Ahura Mazda is believed to be the earliest monotheistic god to surface in religion and a influential figure in Judeo-Christian religions.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of documented creation myths out there. I hope I have sparked your interests in carrying out a cross cultural comparison of creation myths. The internet is an excellent resource to begin your studies, people have documented nearly every imaginable culture’s creation myth online — from Western African ones of the Mande, Yoruba, and Cameroon to the Inuit creation story.

Of course I am biased when I say that I consider anthropology one of the coolest disciplines. But I have reasons as to why I hold this opinion. One of the reasons is that anthropology has and will always be a discipline that integrates and applies methods from other disciplines. The following new research I will share with you is a prime example of what I’m taking about.

In 1999, near the city of Taiyuan, in the Shanxi province, central China, archaeologists uncovered an astonishing find. You may remember it. I do. It is considered one of the most important archaeological finds in China because this Sui dynasty tomb held a sarcophagus with artifacts from the west. The man buried in the tomb went by Yu Hong and inscriptions in his tomb describe him as chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618). Yu Hong died in 592 A.D. His wifey died several years later, and was laid to rest by his side.

If you want, there’s a documentary of the discovery of Yu Hong’s tomb on Amazon’s video download service, Unbox.

I’ve been always curious about this site because of the western artifacts inside his tomb. After doing some digital digging, I found drawings of the reliefs in Yu Hong’s tomb. I have scattered the images around this post. Being Iranian, I clearly can see that these images are not as much Chinese as they are Persian. They look like the images you see on Persian miniatures and inside the Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh.

This totally now makes sense, because what is known of Yu Hong is that his career started in service of the most powerful nomadic tribe at the time, known as the Ruru. Adapted from Wikipedia, the Ruru were,

“a confederation of pre-Mongolian nomadic tribes from the northern borders of China that were kicking it strong until about the late 4th century to 6th century. The Rouran are said to be the later appeared in Europe as the Eurasian Avars or Tartars”

More importantly, Yu Hong was posted as an emissary to several countries, including Iran. So now the puzzle pieces start fitting into place. Yu Hong was probably a worldly traveler, making his way up and down the Silk Roads that connected much of Asia to Europe and the Middle East.

But what remained to be answered is what is known of Yu Hong?

In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B publication, several geneticists from the College of Life Science and the Ancient DNA Laboratory, Research Center for Chinese Frontier Archaeology, at Jilin University in Changchun, China have tried to answer what can be known of Yu Hong’s ancestry from his genes. They analyzed his mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which only comes from the mother’s side. They have reported their findings in the following paper, “Evidence of ancient DNA reveals the first European lineage in Iron Age Central China,” and the paragraph below is the abstract where I have highlighted the most important findings,

“Various studies on ancient DNA have attempted to reconstruct population movement in Asia, with much interest focused on determining the arrival of European lineages in ancient East Asia. Here, we discuss our analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of human remains excavated from the Yu Hong tomb in Taiyuan, China, dated 1400 years ago. The burial style of this tomb is characteristic of Central Asia at that time. Our analysis shows that Yu Hong belonged to the haplogroup U5, one of the oldest western Eurasian-specific haplogroups, while his wife can be classified as haplogroup G, the type prevalent in East Asia. Our findings show that this man with European lineage arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1400 years ago, and most probably married a local woman. Haplogroup U5 was the first west Eurasian-specific lineage to be found in the central part of ancient China, and Taiyuan may be the easternmost location of the discovered remains of European lineage in ancient China.”

Now that’s just the genetic evidence they have gathered from his maternal side, so when you read National Geographic claim that this man was European — be a bit skeptical of the headlines. Remember, his Y chromosome can show a much different data. For all we know, his Dad coulda been part of the haplogroup G and married a U5 haplogroup wife which ended up being Yu Hong’s mom. Until his Y chromosome is analyzed, we may never know. What we know is that at least half of Yu Hong genes were most likely European.

We already knew that Asia was intimately connected with the rest of the world. It did not remain a separate world, although many people may consider that. There are a lot of linguistic, mythological, cultural, musical, medical, etc. similarities between East Asia and East Europe and the Middle East. I mentioned this before, and I’ll say it again, this is so because trade roads were used for thousands of years to connect this massive continent. So this study isn’t all to surprising.

What this study is is a classic synthesis of multidisciplinary approach, with archaeological and genetic evidence. Despite the mtDNA only evidence, the fact that there’s Western artifacts in this tomb and that correlates to genetic data of the inhabitants just simply seem like it goes hand in hand. I hope more archaeological studies do this, especially with the advances we are making in ancient DNA studies.

References:

• Tim Jones reports on, “European Man Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb, Study Reveals” at his blog, Remote Central.
• The Sarcophagus of Yu Hong – The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
• Razib reports on, “Round Eyed Chinese” at his blog Gene Expression.
• Razib reports on , “Round Eyed Chinese Part n” at his blog Gene Expression.