Who built the mysterious city of Shimao in western China?

DNA recovered from people buried at the site brings unexpected answers. According to a new study, those who built Shimao descended from populations that lived there a thousand years ago and not from newcomers. But DNA analysis doesn’t explain the city’s extraordinary innovations.

Since its discovery in 2012, the ancient , in western China, has surprised archaeologists with its scale and size.

The stone walls, built around 2200 a.C.protect a city and a central palace that extend across 4 km²an area larger than that of any other known settlement in China at this time.

A Shimao’s influence about later Chinese civilization is visible in everything from stone carving and jade ornaments to urbanism and architecture. But After all, who built it??

For a long time, archaeologists have questioned whether populations originating from Yellow River Valleywhere later Chinese dynasties found roots, would also have founded Shimao and the towns around it.

In a new one, published on Wednesday in the magazine Naturea team of researchers analyzed DNA recovered from 169 people buried in the mysterious archaeological site.

As the study’s authors concluded, Shimao’s builders were in fact local inhabitants — and that some of the innovations later adopted by Chinese cultures began in the region’s harsh terrain.

The results suggest that the population of the region has not changed much over time, says the archaeologist Jessica Rawsona researcher at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the work.

“This reinforces the idea that China maintained a stable population despite many intrusions from the north”, says Rawson, cited by .

Located just 1 km from the place where later empires would build the famous Great Wall of China to protect themselves from attacks by nomads, the mountainous region was often seen as a remote frontier.

“Shimao is not considered the cradle of Chinese civilization”, says the archaeologist Zhouyong Sunresearcher at Shaanxi Academy of Archeology and co-author of the study.

To test this idea, a team of geneticists compared the DNA of individuals who lived in the region thousand years before the construction of Shimao with people buried in tombs nestled in the hills and rugged valleys of the city.

The DNA matches almost perfectlywhich proves that whoever built the city descended from local populations and not from newcomers. “This tells us that there was not a large migration”, he says Qiaomei Fugeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study.

At the same time, Shimao territory was located on a key route where technology and people from further west entered China.

At the time the city reached its peak, material remains and animal bones show that sheep and cattle were raised there and that the techniques needed to make bronze tools and weapons had been adopted—fundamental technologies, initially developed much further west and reaching the rest of China via the Shimao region.

“This city is seen as a crucial link in the dissemination of metallurgy to the interior of China”, says Sun.

Recent DNA studies in Europe have shown that the spread of major innovations, such as agriculture and metalworking, was accompanied by dramatic migrations.

Therefore, archaeologists expected to find genetic signals of populations coming from the steppes to settle in the Shimao region, bringing with them bronze and pastoralism.

However, the new study once again shows that Shimao’s genetic makeup little has changed, despite these technological transformations powerful.

“Now we need explore other possible explanationss beyond the idea of ​​’new people came’”, he says Zichan Wangan archaeologist at the University of California (UCLA), who was not part of the research team.

Small groups of migrants may, nevertheless, have played an important role, highlights Min Lialso an archaeologist at UCLA and equally absent from the study. “A handful of metallurgical artisans coming from the steppes to the north could have been enough to introduce bronze to Shimao and beyond.”

“I do not believe that the results of the DNA analysis can explain the innovations of Shimao,” says Li. “There should be more diversity there than that which genetic analysis was able to detect”.

Disturbing Details

Genetic analysis also offers clues about the organization of the ruling class from Shimao. Many of the men buried in the city’s richest tombs were related to each other.

Shared Y chromosomes indicate that power and status were transmitted from father to son, which points to what anthropologists call a patrilineal society.

In a group of tombs in Shimao, researchers were able to identify a kind of dynastywith four generations of parents and children buried side by side.

Gender also appears to have played a role in bloody rituals on site. A previous study, published in 2018 in the journal Antiquity, had revealed the piles in sacrificial pits beneath the city’s imposing eastern gate.

Based on examination of the skulls, researchers concluded at the time that They all belonged to young women. However, DNA from 10 of these heads shows that nine were men.

The members of Shimao’s elite were often buried with women lying beside them, probably maids or concubines dead and buried to accompany men in the afterlife.

Num particularly macabre detailDNA recovered from these escorts revealed that some of the women they were related to each otherperhaps members of the same family destined to die with their masters over several generations.

“We assumed they were slaves, but the fact that they were related and placed together in tombs It’s disturbing,” says Li, who was part of the team that conducted the 2018 study.

Rawson remembers that genetic data alonecannot explain the practices of ancient societies. In some regions of ancient China, as in other cultures, a man’s wife or companion was expected to go beyond death.

A pit full of young male skulls is clear evidence of human sacrifice; but a woman buried in a man’s tomb can mean something else.

“We have to be cautious — their belief system is not ours,” he says. “We are still not in a position to fully understand what was going on.”