Amazing stuff! More questions about the cradle of Chinese civilization!
By the way, the Shaanxi Archaeology Museum appears to contain a lot of interesting stuff!
"Since its discovery in 2012, the ancient city of Shimao in western China has surprised archaeologists with its scale and size. Its stone walls, built around 2200 B.C.E., shelter a city and central palace that spreads over 4 square kilometers, larger than any other settlement in China at the time.
Shimao’s influence on later Chinese civilization can be seen in everything from stone carving and jade ornaments to urban planning and architecture. But who actually built it?
Scientists had long wondered whether people from China’s Yellow River Valley, where later Chinese dynasties had their roots, also founded Shimao and its surrounding settlements. DNA recovered from 169 people buried at and around the site, described today in Nature, suggest its builders were indeed locals, and that some of the innovations adopted by later Chinese cultures began in Shimao’s rugged terrain. ...
The genetic analysis also offers clues to the organization of Shimao’s ruling class. The men in many of the city’s richest tombs were related. Their shared Y chromosomes suggest power and status was passed from father to son, indicating what anthropologists call a patrilineal society. In one group of Shimao tombs, researchers could tell there was a sort of dynasty at play, with four generations of fathers and sons buried close to one another. ..."
From the abstract:
"The discovery of Shimao city (around 2300–1800 bce), a premier state-level Neolithic fortified settlement in Shaanxi, China, played an important role in helping us understand the emergence of socially stratified urban societies. However, key questions remain regarding how ancestry and kinship shaped the hierarchy of this class-based society characterized by human sacrifice. The origin of the founding populations of Shimao and other Loess Plateau settlements, and their interactions within the broader ancestral landscape, have yet to be determined. Here we present, by sequencing 144 ancient genomes from Shimao city and its satellites, pedigrees among tomb owners spanning up to four generations.
These findings reveal a predominantly patrilineal descent structure across Shimao communities, and possibly sex-specific sacrificial rituals. We also characterize the population history, revealing that Shimao culture-related populations originated mostly from a Yangshao culture-related population present at least 1,000 years earlier, and the lasting inflow of Yumin-related populations from Inner Mongolia did not interrupt regional genetic continuity. Broader genetic influence from southern mainland ancestry over Shimao culture-related populations supports evidence of rice farming expanding further north than previously expected. Together, these results uncover fine details of the regional peopling and social structure of early state establishment."
At the ancient Chinese city of Shimao, massive stone walls enclosed an area covering 4 square kilometers.
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