During the early 21st Century a strange collection of texts were found in Western China. Along with this, several mummies, preserved by the arid heat of the Tarim Basin, were discovered and the two were linked together. Chinese writings tell us of blonde and red-haired people in their Western regions, but this seemed unlikely due to the sheer distance to Europe. In fact, they were right. Later DNA evidence claimed that these people were indeed European in origin and their language gave further supporting evidence for this. The Tocharians, as they are now formally called, moved to the East from Western Europe in the early days of the Indo-European civilisation. The Tocharian languages, dubbed Tocharian A and Tocharian B, are of Indo-European origin and therefore have many similarities with other European languages. In fact, although these languages are the most Eastern Indo-European languages that have been found, they share many characteristics with Western European languages and much fewer with the Indian and Iranian languages. The discovery of this people changed how linguists viewed the Indo-European languages. This is because previous thoughts steered towards distinct Eastern and Western dialects forming from Proto-Indo-European, but now it appears very different, with the 'Western' languages encircling the 'Eastern' ones.
