Uyghurs
Contemporary scholars consider modern Uyghurs to be the descendants of a number of people, including the ancient Uyghurs of Mongolia who arrived at the Tarim Basin after the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate, Iranic Saka tribes, and other Indo-European peoples who inhabited the Tarim Basin before the arrival of the Turkic Uyghurs. DNA analyses indicate that the peoples of central Asia such as the Uyghurs are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. Uyghur activists identify with the Tarim mummies, remains of an ancient people who inhabited the region, but research into the genetics of ancient Tarim mummies and their links with modern Uyghurs remains problematic, both to Chinese government officials concerned with ethnic separatism, and to Uyghur activists concerned that the research could affect their people's claim of being indigenous to the region.
History of the Uyghur people
Many historians traced the ancestry of the Uyghur tribe to the Altaic pastoralists called Tiele (Tura in Uyghur), who lived in the valleys south of Lake Baikal and around the Yenisei River. The Tiele first appear in history AD 357 under the Chinese ethnonym "Gaoche" (Qangqil in Uyghur), referring to the ox-drawn carts with distinctive high wheels used for yurt transportation. Tiele tribal territories had previously been occupied by the Dingling, an ancient Siberian people, some of whom had been absorbed into the Tiele. The Tiele practiced some minor agriculture and were highly developed metalsmiths due to the abundance of easily available iron ore in the Yenisei River.