The mummies, which date back 4,000 years, were initially discovered a century ago in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China Jason Hahn is a former Human Interest and Sports Reporter for PEOPLE.

The human remains were recovered from some of hundreds of coffins found in the Xiaohe Cemetery in China's Tarim Basin in the 1990s. Smeared across the heads and necks of a number of the mummified ...

For the first time, scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years.