Ancient DNA Reveals Kinship Secrets of Prehistoric China’s Shimao City
- Ritambhara K
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Credit: XINHUA
Scientists have tapped into the power of ancient DNA to unravel the sophisticated social fabric of one of China’s earliest urban centers, revealing a community marked by striking genetic diversity yet firmly rooted in the authority of patrilineal clans.
Published Thursday in Nature, the groundbreaking study presents the first direct genetic evidence illuminating the origins of the Shimao population—the builders of Shimao, an enormous Neolithic walled city in northern China.
The settlement flourished around 4,300 years ago before being mysteriously abandoned roughly five centuries later. Through DNA recovered from ancient human remains, researchers have been able to peer into the kinship structures, hierarchical systems, and even the gender-specific sacrificial practices of an early state-level society in East Asia.
Sprawling across four million square meters, Shimao is the largest known prehistoric city in China. Its monumental architecture—including pyramid-like platforms, massive stone fortifications, palatial complexes, and intricate carvings—combined with exquisite jade artifacts, paints a portrait of a highly stratified and technologically advanced civilization. Yet for decades, scholars have debated who its people were, where they came from, and how they organized themselves within this vast stone metropolis.
Tracing Ancient Lineages
Led by Fu Qiaomei of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), researchers analyzed DNA from 144 individuals unearthed from Shimao’s central districts and surrounding satellite settlements.
Few ancient sites worldwide have yielded genomic data on such a large scale, making Shimao the first highly complex society to be decoded through ancient DNA at this depth—especially one so heavily tied to elaborate ritual sacrifices.
The results reveal that the majority of Shimao inhabitants descended from local Yangshao culture farmers, who lived on the Loess Plateau more than a thousand years earlier. This continuity highlights a long-standing regional lineage.
Yet the city was far from isolated: some individuals bore genetic traces of northern steppe pastoralists, while others carried ancestry linked to southern rice-farming populations. These findings point to extensive long-distance interactions and reinforce the early “pluralistic-yet-unified” nature of Chinese civilization.
A Rigid, Clan-Based Society
One of the most remarkable breakthroughs was the reconstruction of detailed family trees—some stretching across four generations—revealing a society structured overwhelmingly around patrilineal clans. Elite tombs showed that high-status male leaders formed the core of these lineages, while their wives originated from genetically distinct external groups.
The study also provides new insights into Shimao’s chilling ritual sacrifices. Mass grave “skull pits” contained mostly male victims, while elite tombs featured almost exclusively female attendants.
These individuals were not biologically related to the tomb owners, though some female victims were related to one another—suggesting that certain families or communities may have been specifically targeted for sacrificial purposes.
The lack of kinship between victims and elites, along with evidence that high-status families avoided close-kin marriages, highlights a sharply defined social hierarchy and strictly controlled lineage structure.
Together, these findings offer an unprecedented glimpse into the population dynamics, political power, and ceremonial practices that shaped one of East Asia’s earliest urban civilizations, shedding new light on the origins of early state societies in China.
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