Afanasievo people may well have been proto-Tocharian speakers (Ning et al. 2019)

During the Early Bronze Age, around 2,900 BCE, a population associated with the Yamnaya archeological culture migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe deep into Asia, as far as the Minusinsk Basin in South Siberia.
This rapid, long-range expansion was likely to have been the first significant migration of a Yamnaya-related group far to the east of the Ural Mountains, and it resulted in the formation of the Afanasievo archeological culture (see here).
The appearance of Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin, in what is now western China, is often associated with the Afanasievo culture, mainly because of the confirmed presence of European-related populations in the Tarim Basin during the Bronze Age, as well as the likely highly divergent position of the Tocharian node in the Indo-European language phylogeny.
But the Afanasievo people were separated by considerable distance in space and time from the Tocharians, and can’t yet be reliably linked to them with archeological or genetic data. So even though the inference that the former are linguistically ancestral to the latter is quite plausible, it’s far from certain.
However, thanks to a new paper at Current Biology by Ning et al., at least we now know that a population with significant Yamnaya/Afanasievo-related ancestry was living in the eastern Tianshan Mountains just a few hundred years before Tocharian languages were attested nearby [LINK]. Below is the paper summary, emphasis is mine:

Recent studies of early Bronze Age human genomes revealed a massive population expansion by individuals-related to the Yamnaya culture, from the Pontic Caspian steppe into Western and Eastern Eurasia, likely accompanied by the spread of Indo-European languages [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The south eastern extent of this migration is currently not known. Modern-day human populations from the Xinjiang region in northwestern China show a complex population history, with genetic links to both Eastern and Western Eurasia [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. However, due to the lack of ancient genomic data, it remains unclear which source populations contributed to the Xinjiang population and what was the timing and the number of admixture events. Here, we report the first genome-wide data of 10 ancient individuals from northeastern Xinjiang. They are dated to around 2,200 years ago and were found at the Iron Age Shirenzigou site. We find them to be already genetically admixed between Eastern and Western Eurasians. We also find that the majority of the East Eurasian ancestry in the Shirenzigou individuals is-related to northeastern Asian populations, while the West Eurasian ancestry is best presented by ∼20% to 80% Yamnaya-like ancestry. Our data thus suggest a Western Eurasian steppe origin for at least part of the ancient Xinjiang population. Our findings furthermore support a Yamnaya-related origin for the now extinct Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin, in southern Xinjiang.

Ning et al., Ancient Genomes Reveal Yamnaya-Related Ancestry and a Potential Source of Indo-European Speakers in Iron Age Tianshan, Current Biology, July 25, 2019, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.044
See also…
It was always going to be this way
The mystery of the Sintashta people
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but…

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