January 25, 1997
"Early cross-cultural ties arise in China" (SN: 10/19/96, p. 245) states that the 3,000-year-old corpses found near Beijing and the 2,000- to 4,000-year-old mummified bodies found in the Xinjiang Province of China must be those of Europeans.
One does not have to cross Eurasia to find their owners.
Xinjiang (or Eastern Turkistan) and the rest of Central Asia has always been the home of Turks, who are Caucasians. They were good horse riders and had close trade and cultural contacts, as well as military conflicts, with China throughout history.
The corpses and mummified bodies belong to the natives of those lands and the neighbors of the Chinese, the Turks or the Uygur Turks.
T. Nejat Veziroglu
Coral Gables, Fla.
Trawling and other types of bottom fishing also cause irreparable damage to shipwrecks and other submerged cultural resources ("Fishing for Answers," SN: 10/26/96, p. 268). If trawl gear can dislodge and scatter boulders, just imagine its effects on fragile artifacts and waterlogged ships' timbers. As a nautical archaeologist, I have seen firsthand the disastrous results.
To make matters worse, each cultural resource is unique and, once destroyed, cannot reproduce or regenerate.
I hope that future trawling studies will take into account the regrettable loss to our cultural heritage as well as to the natural environment.
John Broadwater
Williamsburg, Va.
Don't compare trawling to clearcutting, put it this way: If, in order to harvest a head of cattle, we went out with a bulldozer and scooped him up along with a couple of tons of his pasture, dumping the dirt in a pile on the way to the slaughterhouse, how long would we raise beef?
San Norton
Otto, N.C.
The exploratory work on rogue waves in the ocean ("Rough math: Focusing on rogue waves at sea," SN: 11/23/96, p. 325) made me wonder if large rogue electromagnetic waves could also be produced in complex interactions. Although research has failed to find any strong link between increased electromagnetic emissions and cancer, perhaps random eddy fields and strong nodes produced by the sea of overlapping radio frequencies around us are capable of producing rogue electromagnetic waves that can rock the genetic boat.
Dan Peyton
Camarillo, Calif.
Table of Contents -- January 25, 1997
