For a project I need to represent inhabitants of some of the big Silk Road cities (Dunhuang, Kashgar, and Samarkand), set between 700 AD and 1200 AD. It's not hard to find reference images of those cities' current inhabitants, but I'd like to be as accurate as I can. I'm not talking about clothing, but rather about facial features and skin color traits normally associated with ethnicity.
Is it safe for me to assume that these populations looked more or less the same 1200 years ago?
I don't know if I can completely answer your question but I know with mummified remains that using computers we can try to model what that person for instance looked like at that time for example they have done this with king tut to model what he probably looked like.