The Houston Museum of Natural Science's exhibit on China's Silk Road opens Aug. 27 and it features one of the most emotionally jarring artifacts we've yet faced.

No, it's not a stinking flower, it's the infant mummy — a near-perfectly preserved corpse (circa the 8th century) of an 8-to-10-month-year-old child who died in modern day China's most inhospitable region.

The infant accompanies a mummy known as "The Beauty of Xiaohe," a young woman so well-maintained by the whims of nature that she still has her eyelashes, more than 3,800 years after her death.

The mummies are some of the earliest artifacts on display in the exhibit, which spans more than 3,500 years of history.

Most interesting about the mummies' discovery is that they have Western features — indicating that slow but sure migration (likely in groups of 20 or 30 over thousands of years) occurred between Eurasia and what is now modern China, even before the Silk Road established a familiar trade route. Historians had this hunch for years, but searched in vain for evidence before DNA tests were able to prove the migrant's heritage.

Artifacts spanning the history of China's Xinjiang area are also on view, but the the pair of natural mummies (who are not related and were found several hundred miles away from one another and died 1,000 years apart) are far and away the most stunning.

The infant is heart wrenching in the care that was obviously taken in its burial; and the Beauty of Xiaohe has truly beautiful features.

The exhibit will remain at HMNS until Jan. 2. Curator of Anthropology Dirk van Tuerenhout will host a webinar on Aug. 24 at 7 p.m.