> Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract We do know that the Tocharians were a people [1

> Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract We do know that the Tocharians were a people [1], as they were identified as such by writings in Sanskrit, Greek, and Persian. But the Tocharian language is too late (400-1200CE) to make any connection to the Tarim mummies, which date to 1800BC. However, the Tocharian language has distinctive features that suggest that it branched at a very early date (3000BC [1]) from the other Indo European languages, which would put its "origin" date far earlier than its attestation date, and possibly (though not provably) associated with the Tarim mummies. The signals point both ways, and as you say, this was a diverse part of the world in ancient times, so it's impossible to know what language they spoke given current evidence. They could just as well have been multilingual. > It should be noted that research in this field is extremely politicized within China even by local standards. Yeah, this is very unfortunate, but common across Asia as countries form post-colonial national identities, but in doing so force complex questions about history and human migrations into the service of very simplistic nationalist identity narratives. You see this particularly in India, where the nationalists in power reject (without basis) the entire notion that the Indo-European languages originated in Central Asia (i.e. Yamnaya culture). This is of course not to excuse the biases of colonial scholarship, which had its own serious problems in how it characterized linguistic and archaeological discoveries, allowing them them to be pushed into service of colonial nationalist narratives. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-European_expansions.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-Euro...