Major corridor of Silk Road already home to high-mountain herders over 4,000 years ago
Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic cattle, sheep and goats made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago, as published in a study in PLOS ONE.
Long before the formal creation of the Silk Road—a complex system of trade routes linking East and West Eurasia through its arid continental interior—pastoral herders living in the mountains of Central Asia helped form new cultural and biological links across this region. However, in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan’s Alay Valley, a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oasis cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, very little is known about the lifestyles of early people who lived there in the centuries and millennia preceding the Silk Road era. Read more.











