The steppe and the oasis cities between China and Persia carried horses, silk, faiths and armies across Eurasia. These articles follow the nomadic confederations and the trade routes that connected the settled empires on either side.
In 1938 Okladnikov found a child's skeleton ringed by ibex horns in an Uzbek cave. DNA in 2007 and a 2012 study call it Neanderthal; a 2009 study did not.
· 70,000 BCIn 2003 a child's teeth and 121 skull fragments came out of layer 16 at Obi-Rakhmat, Uzbekistan. The teeth read as Neanderthal; the skull did not settle it.
· 70,000 BCA fingertip bone dug up in 2008 at Denisova Cave in the Altai held DNA unlike any Neanderthal or modern human. Its kin live on in Tibetan and Papuan DNA.
· 50,000 BCA Mal'ta humerus sampled at the Hermitage in 2009 dated to 24,000 years; the Siberian boy's genome sat between western Eurasians and Native Americans.
· 22,000 BCRaphael Pumpelly dug the two mounds at Anau in 1904 in two-foot levels, found wheat and barley chaff, and argued that drying oases sent people outward.
· 4500 BCTajikistan's physical-technical institute dates Sarazm's first dig to 1976; Roland Besenval's 1987 paper says Isakov discovered the site in 1979.
· 3500 BCNamed in 2009 as the earliest horse-domestication site, Botai in Kazakhstan lost that claim in 2018 when DNA made its horses the ancestors of Przewalski's.
· 3500 BCCharred millet, wheat and barley from cremation cists at Begash and Tasbas in Kazakhstan date to about 2300 BC; their excavators later doubted what they show.
· 2300 BCArkaim reserve records say dam work began in November 1986; a 1987 survey found a ringed Bronze Age settlement, and the reservoir was canceled in April 1991.
· 2000 BCA Soviet expedition found the Gonur oasis in Turkmenistan's Karakum desert in 1974. Its Bronze Age city traded with the Indus; its dates are disputed.
· 2000 BCIn 1934 Folke Bergman counted 120 coffins by the Small River. A 2021 Nature study of 18 genomes found the Tarim mummies had no western ancestry.
· 1900 BCUnder the Arzhan 2 mound in Tuva, southern Siberia, a man and a woman of the 7th century BC lay with 33 other people, 14 horses and over 40 pounds of gold.
· 650 BCPermafrost under the Pazyryk mounds in the Altai kept felt, wood, horses, tattooed skin, a wagon and a knotted carpet from the 5th to 4th century BC.
· 400 BCFound on a royal hunt in 1961 and dug by a French mission until 1978, Ai Khanoum in north Afghanistan held a Greek theater, gymnasium and Delphic maxims.
· 250 BCOstraca beside Old Nisa's Square House named a Parthian fortress Mithradatkert, where about fifty ivory rhyta and a disputed Round Hall survive.
· 200 BCFrom November 15, 1978, Viktor Sarianidi's team found six unlooted graves at Tillya Tepe, Afghanistan, with a Tiberius aureus and about 20,000 gold objects.
· AD 25Two walled-up rooms at Begram, 1937 and 1939, held Roman glass, Indian ivory and Han lacquer. Half went to Paris; 20 ivories returned to Kabul in 2012.
· AD 100A Bactrian stone unearthed in 1993 in Baghlan gives Kanishka's year one, four generations of Kushan kings, a switch from Greek and four Gangetic cities.
· AD 127Sogdian merchants from Samarkand and Bukhara, who kept colonies across China from the AD 300s to the 700s and faded after the Arab conquest.
· AD 600Tang and Abbasid armies fought at Talas in July 751, but Sogdian letters on paper from about 313 show Central Asia had paper centuries earlier.
· AD 751Cave 17 at Mogao held manuscripts from the 4th to the early 11th century until Wang Yuanlu opened it in 1900. Stein and Pelliot bought much of it from 1907.
· 1000A minaret collapsed at Bukhara around 1121-22 and destroyed two-thirds of a new mosque. Arslan Khan Mohammad's replacement, 48 meters high, rose in 1127.
· 1127A Franciscan friar entered the Mongol capital on May 7, 1254, sized it against a village near Paris, and described a silver fountain and Mongke's creed.
· 1254Ulugh Beg's observatory at Samarkand held an arc of about 40 m radius. Its star tables were finished by 1440; he was put to death on October 25, 1449.
· 1429
