5000-year-old ‘graveyard of giants’ found in a Chinese village

Archaeologists in China have discovered a 5000-year-old graveyard of abnormally tall people who used to live in the country’s Shandong province. The skeletal remains measured over six feet in height.

An archaeological excavation at Jiaojia village in Jinan City’s Zhangqiu District has uncovered 104 houses, 205 graves, and 20 sacrificial pits, according to Xinhua.

Pottery and various objects made with jade were also unearthed during the dig.

The Late Neolithic site uncovered in China dates back to a time when the Yellow River Valley was inhabited by the Longshan Culture, also known as the Black Pottery Culture, which was popular in the region from 3000 to 1900 BC.

The archaeological dig, initiated last year, was led by the University of Shandong.

An analysis of the skeletal remains suggests the ancient people living in the region were unusually tall, Xinhua reported.

The findings said the tallest individual found in the grave was a male who measured 6’3″.

According to prior studies, the Neolithic males typically measure around 5’5″ and the females around 5’1″. 

The researchers attributed the unusual height to genetics and environment. 

Lead archaeologist Fang Hui, while speaking to Xinhua, said the Late Neolithic civilisation engaged in agriculture, therefore the villagers in the region had access to a variety of nutritious food which could have added to their overall physical growth.

“I suspect that this big game specialisation associated with a surplus of high-quality proteins and low population density created environmental conditions leading to the selection of exceptionally tall males,” said the study’s lead author Pavel Grasgruber in an interview with Seeker.

The tallest of the Longshan men were found in tombs, which the Shandong archaeologists said was because of their higher social status and access to better food.

DNA reveals surprise ancestry of mysterious Chinese mummies

Since their discovery a century ago, hundreds of naturally preserved mummies found in China’s Tarim Basin have been a mystery to archaeologists. Some thought the Bronze Age remains were from migrants from thousands of kilometres to the west, who had brought farming practices to the area. But now, a genomic analysis suggests they were indigenous people who may have adopted agricultural methods from neighbouring groups.

As they report today in Nature1, researchers have traced the ancestry of these early Chinese farmers to Stone Age hunter-gatherers who lived in Asia some 9,000 years ago. They seem to have been genetically isolated, but despite this had learnt to raise livestock and grow grains in the same way as other groups.

The study hints at “the really diverse ways in which populations move and don’t move, and how ideas can spread with, but also through, populations”, says co-author Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

The finding demonstrates that cultural exchange doesn’t always go hand in hand with genetic ties, says Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “Just because those people are trading, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are marrying one another or having children,” he says.

Perfect preservation environment

Starting in the early twentieth century, the mummies were found in cemeteries belonging to the so-called Xiaohe culture, which are scattered across the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region of China.

The desert “is one of the most hostile places on Earth”, says Alison Betts, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Here, bodies had been buried in boat-shaped coffins wrapped in cattle hide. The hot, arid and salty environment of the desert naturally preserved them, keeping everything from hair to clothing perfectly intact. Before the latest study, “we knew an awful lot about these people, physically, but we knew nothing about who they were and why they were there”, says Betts.

The mummies — which were buried over a period of 2,000 years or more — date to a significant time in Xinjiang’s history, when ancient communities were shifting from hunter-gatherers to farmers, she adds.

Some of the later mummies were buried with woollen fabrics and clothing similar to those of cultures found in the west. The graves also contained millet, wheat, animal bones and dairy products — evidence of agricultural and pastoral technologies characteristic of cultures in other regions of Eurasia, which led researchers to hypothesize that these people were originally migrants from the west, who had passed through Siberia, Afghanistan or Central Asia.

The researchers behind the latest study — based in China, South Korea, Germany and the United States — took DNA from the mummies to test these ideas, but found no evidence to support them.

They sequenced the genomes of 13 individuals who lived between 4,100 and 3,700 years ago and whose bodies were found in the lowest layers of the Tarim Basin cemeteries in southern Xinjiang, as well as another 5 mummies from hundreds of kilometres away in northern Xinjiang, who lived between 5,000 and 4,800 years ago.

They then compared the genetic profiles of these people with previously sequenced genomes from more than 100 ancient groups of people, and those of more than 200 modern populations, from around the world.

Two groups of people

They found that the northern Xinjiang individuals shared some parts of their genomes with Bronze Age migrants from the Altai Mountains of Central Asia who lived about 5,000 years ago — supporting an earlier hypothesis.

But the 13 people from the Tarim Basin did not share this ancestry. They seem to be solely related to hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Siberia and what is now northern Kazakhstan some 9,000 years ago, says co-author Choongwon Jeong, a population and evolutionary geneticist at Seoul National University. The northern Xinjiang individuals also shared some of this ancestry.

Evidence of dairy products was found alongside the youngest mummies from the upper layers of cemeteries in the Tarim Basin, so the researchers analysed calcified dental plaque on the teeth of some of the older mummies to see how far back dairy farming went. In the plaque, they found milk proteins from cattle, sheep and goats, suggesting that even the earliest settlers here consumed dairy products. “This founding population had already incorporated dairy pastoralism into their way of life,” says Warinner.

But the study raises many more questions about how the people of the Xiaohe culture got these technologies, from where and from whom, says Betts. “That’s the next thing we need to try and resolve.”

The Immortal Armour of China Jade burial suits

Threaded hand-crafted from thousands of precious stone slabs with silver and gold during the Han Dynasty about 2000 years ago, ancient China’s jade burial suits were built as armour for the afterlife to prevent mortal decay.

The Jude Burial Suits of China are maybe the most opulent type of burial in history. Ceremonial suits composed of jade and gold thread were the chosen way of afterlife immortality for Han Dynasty China’s royal members.

Small discs strung onto necklaces as emblems of political power and religious authority, or ceremonial instruments like axes, knives, and chisels, were fashioned from nephrite jade.

Jade became associated with Chinese conceptions of the soul, protective properties, and immortality in the ‘essence’ of stone over time due to its hardness, durability, and delicate transparent hues (yu Zhi, shi Zhi jing ye).

With the rise of the Han Dynasty (China’s second imperial dynasty) in 202 BC-AD, 9 AD and AD 25 AD–220 AD, the association with jade’s longevity is clear from the text by the Chinese historian Sima Qian (145 – 86 BC) about Emperor Wu of Han (157 BC–87 BC), who was described as having a jade cup inscribed with the words “Long Life to the Lord of Men,” and indulging with an elixir of jade powder mixed with sweet dew.

Jade articles were first documented in literature around 320 AD, although there is archaeological evidence that they existed earlier than half a century.

However, their existence was not verified until 1968, when the tomb of Han Dynasty ruler Liu Sheng and his wife Princess Dou Wan was found.

The undisturbed tomb, said to be one of the most important archaeological findings of the twentieth century, was discovered in Hebei Province behind an iron wall between two brick walls and a passageway packed with stone.

They were composed of hundreds of tiny jade plates stitched together with gold thread. There were also jade pieces designed to conceal the eyes and plugs to fit into the eyes, ears, and other orifices.

All in the sake of keeping the bad at bay. Each suite is divided into twelve sections: the face, head, front and rear portions, arms, gloves, leggings, and feet. Liu Sheng’s outfit was very opulent. It was composed of 2498 pieces of jade that were stitched together with 1.1kg of gold thread and took an estimated 10 years to complete. On occasion, the remains were also placed in elaborate jade-covered coffins, which were equally spectacular, having been constructed with hundreds of solid gold nails.

Sets of instructions and standards for how the outfits should be made were also discovered. These rules are detailed in “The Book of Later Han.”

However, a study of the suits reveals that they were not always designed to meet the stated standards. The quality of the 15 outfits revealed varies.

The type of thread used was determined by the deceased’s status, according to Hu Hànsh (The Book of the Later Han). An emperor’s jade suit was threaded with gold, lessor royals and high-ranking nobles wore silver threaded jade suits, sons and daughters of the lessor wore copper threaded jade suits, and lower-ranked aristocrats wore silk threaded jade suits.

Emperor Wen of Wei ordered that the production of jade suits be stopped, as they encouraged tomb looters who would burn the suits to retrieve the gold thread in AD 223.

Jade failed to prevent soft tissue deterioration. Nonetheless, because jade is permeable, DNA from the royal pair may be entrenched in the stones for 2,000 years after their deaths, granting them a kind of immortality.

The largest animal-shaped bronze mythical beast unearthed at Sanxingdui

Chinese archaeologists have unearthed a big bronze beast – one of the most highly anticipated treasures of the Sanxingdui ruins – a year after spotting it in a pit at the mysterious site in Sichuan province.

The bronze was discovered in July last year, but archaeologists were not able to lift it out of the pit until Wednesday, when other bronze objects piled on top of the statue were removed.

The bronze animal is the biggest ever found in decades of digging at the site. It weighs around 150kg (330lbs) and has a large mouth, small waist, huge ears and four embellished hooves.

According to Zhao Hao, a Peking University archaeologist in charge of the pit that contained the object, all other bronze animals uncovered at the site since digging began in the 1980s measured around 20 to 30cm (7.9 to 11.8 inches).

“But this one is very large in size, with height and width both measuring about one metre (3.3 feet). It’s the only one at the whole site,” Zhao was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying.

A human figurine was attached to what looks like a horn on the creature’s head. The figure was dressed in a long gown and appeared to be riding or controlling the animal.

Another human-shaped artefact was found lying by the animal’s side with its head missing. Human statuettes in different postures were also found nearby, which Zhao speculated could originally have been attached to the bronze beast’s body.

“A holy tree was cast on the chest of the animal, showing people in Sanxingdui worshipped the holy tree or treated it as a god,” Zhao was quoted as saying. “Such a configuration has not been found among any previously excavated artefacts. It’s extremely interesting.”

His team also speculated there could be a larger object that was attached to the beast’s back and has yet to be unearthed.

The Sanxingdui ruins, considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, are believed to be at the heart of the mysterious Shu kingdom, which dates back some 4,500 years. But researchers have yet to find written records of the kingdom.

The ruins were discovered in the southwestern city of Guanghan in the late 1920s, but excavation work did not start until the 1980s, when archaeologists made a breakthrough and discovered two sacrificial pits containing more than 1,700 artefacts.

More than 400 class A artefacts – the most historically and culturally valuable, according to China’s classification system – were unearthed at the ruins during the first two decades of digging.

The excavation was paused in 2002, resuming only in 2020, after six more pits were identified. More than 13,000 artefacts have been uncovered since then, including a bronze sacrificial altar with human figures, a bronze sculpture with a human head and snake body and a dragon-shaped bronze statue with a pig’s nose.

This round of field excavation work will be completed in September, after which archaeologists will begin restoring, categorising and researching the newly uncovered artefacts.

Hell’s Shells: 90 Million-Year-Old Egg From Turtle Bigger Than Humans

A giant fossilized turtle egg — believed to have been laid by a turtle the length of a fully grown human 90 million years ago — has been found with the embryo inside.

The tennis ball-sized egg, which is protected by an unusually thick outer shell, was found in 2018 by a farmer in China’s Henan Province, who sent it to a university for analysis.

The research team, which included scientists from the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, the Henan Geological Museum and Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, carried out CT scans on the egg.

The scans revealed that within the thick fossilized shell, a turtle embryo that was 85 per cent developed had been preserved.

Further examination revealed that the embryo was probably a member of the Yuchelys nanyangensis species, which went extinct during the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago. The fossilized find is also believed to be part of the Nanhsiungchelyidae, an extinct family of land turtles from the Cretaceous period that were native to Asia and North America.

Such turtles were flat-shelled and lived on dry land, which was unusual at the time, said Darla Zelenitsky, a researcher from the Canada’s University of Calgary.

While thousands of dinosaur eggs have been found in Henan Province over the past 30 years, Zelenitsky said they are rarely found in good condition.

“In comparison with dinosaur eggs, turtle eggs — especially those with preserved embryos — rarely fossilize because they’re so small and fragile,” she said.

Zelenitskythey said that this egg likely survived because of its unusually thick shell, which the research team measured at 0.07 inches, several times thicker than the eggs of Galapagos turtles at 0.01 inches.

Judging by the size of the shell, the team estimated that it was laid by a turtle with a 5.3-foot-long carapace, meaning that from its neck to its tail, it would have been longer than some humans are tall.

Zelenitsky said that part of the shell was broken from the inside, so it’s possible that the embryo tried to hatch but has been trapped in its shell for 90 million years.

The study was published online on Aug. 18 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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Ancient DNA adds to evidence of Native Americans’ east Asian ancestry

An ancient woman’s skull from south-west China suggests she was related to a population that migrated from east Asia to North America 14,000 years ago, DNA has shown.

Researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China for the first time. Current Biology publishes data that suggests the mysterious hominid may have been related to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that may have contributed to Native American origins.

Bing Su of the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says ancient DNA techniques are compelling. The Red Deer Cave dwellers were modern humans rather than archaic species like Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features.

Genomes from these fossils were compared with genomes from people around the globe. Upon further investigation, they determined that the bones belonged to someone with roots in East Asian Native American culture.

These findings, combined with data from earlier research, led the researchers to propose that some South East Asians had reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago via Japan along the coast of present-day East China.

In this way, they reached North America for the first time by crossing the Bering Strait, which separates Asia from North America. Almost 30 years ago, Chinese archaeologists discovered large bone fragments in a cave in the Yunnan province, in the south of the country, called Maludong or Red Deer, kickstarting the path to the recent find.

According to carbon dating, the fossils date from the Late Pleistocene, approximately 14,000 years ago, when modern humans were migrating around the globe.

Researchers recovered a hominid’s skull with modern and archaic features in the cave. For example, a Neanderthal-like skull shape and smaller brains were seen in the specimens.

Due to this, some anthropologists believed that the skull likely belonged to an unknown archaic human species or to a hybrid population of archaics and modern humans.

In 2018, Bing Su and his colleagues successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull in collaboration with Xueping Ji.

This was in collaboration with the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. The genome of the hominid shows that it descended from an extinct maternal lineage of modern humans. These descendants live in East Asia, the Indochinese peninsula, and the Southeast Asian islands.

The findings also demonstrate that southern East Asian hominins possessed more genetic and morphological diversity than northern East Asians during the Late Pleistocene. Based on this, Su suggests that the first humans in East Asia settled in the south before some moved north.

The study provides important evidence for understanding early human migration, Su says. Next, the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA using fossils from southern East Asia, especially those that predate the Red Deer Cave dwellers.

In addition to a better understanding of how our ancestors migrated, these data will also be helpful in understanding how humans have changed their physical appearance over time as they adapted to a changing environment. Su concludes: “These data may provide us with information about how humans have changed their physical appearance as they have adapted to local environments over time.”

Study Offers Insight Into Metallurgy in Ancient China

An analysis of a 2,300-year-old text and coins has helped researchers decipher ancient recipes for bronze, including two linguistically elusive ingredients.

The Kao Gong Ji, the oldest known technical encyclopedia, was written around 300 BC and is part of a larger text called The Rites of Zhou. The ancient text includes six chemistry formulas for mixing bronze and lists items like swords, bells, axes, knives and mirrors, as well as how to make them.

For the past 100 years, researchers have struggled to translate two of the main ingredients, which are listed as “jin”and “xi.” Experts believed these words translated to copper and tin, which are key components in the bronze-making process. When researchers tried to re-create the recipes, however, the resulting metal didn’t match up with the composition of ancient Chinese artefacts.

Now, two researchers believe they have accurately identified the true meaning behind the mystery ingredients. The journal Antiquity published its findings on Tuesday.

The revelation allows for a better understanding of ancient bronze production — and opens up new questions about when this process began, given that large-scale bronze production happened long before the six recipes were shared in the Kao Gong Ji, said study coauthor Ruiliang Liu, curator of the Early China Collection at the British Museum in London.

In modern Chinese, jin means gold. But the ancient meaning of the word could be copper, copper alloy or even just metal, which is why it has been difficult to determine the specific ingredients.

“These recipes were used in the largest bronze industry in Eurasia during this period,” said Liu in a statement. “Attempts to reconstruct these processes have been made for more than a hundred years, but have failed.”

Chemical analysis

Liu and lead study author Mark Pollard analyzed the chemical composition of Chinese coins minted close to when the Kao Gong Ji was written. Pollard is the Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at Oxford University and director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art.

Previously, researchers had thought the coins were made by diluting copper with tin and lead.

The analysis showed that the chemical composition of the coins was a result of mixing two pre-prepared metal alloys, one made of copper, tin and lead, and the other copper and lead.

The two researchers concluded jin and xi were likely premixed metal alloys.

“For the first time in more than 100 years of scholarship, we have produced a viable explanation of how to interpret the recipes for making bronze objects in early China given in the (Kao Gong Ji),” Pollard said in a statement.

The findings have shown that ancient Chinese bronze-making relied on combining alloys instead of pure metals and that metalsmithing was more complex than previously thought.

“It indicates an additional step — the production of pre-prepared alloys — in the manufacturing process of copper-alloy objects in early China,” Liu said. “This represents an additional but previously unknown layer in the web of metal production and supply in China.”

Archaeologically, this additional step would have remained invisible if not for chemical analysis, the researchers said.

“Understanding the alloying practice is crucial for us to understand the exquisite bronze ritual vessels as well as the underlying mass production in Shang and Zhou societies,” Liu said.

Using this type of analysis could help researchers decipher other texts about ancient metallurgy from different cultures and regions in the future, the researchers said.

Human skeletons, and relics found in Pingtung date back 4,000 years: Archaeologists

Taipei, July 27 (CNA) Archaeologists in Taiwan confirmed Wednesday that a large number of human skeletons and shell tools unearthed in Pingtung County are about 4,000 years old, which makes the shell tool site the oldest in the Pacific region.

Chiu Hung-lin (邱鴻霖), an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University’s (NTHU) Institute of Anthropology, said he and his team had learned about the site in Eluanbi Park on the southern tip of Taiwan in 2017, when work began on a project to convert the dilapidated shops in the area into green structures.

The project was halted when the contractor found shell tools, human skeletal remains and slate coffins in a shallow site in the park, Chiu told CNA.

He said the Kenting National Park Headquarters then commissioned the NTHU team, led by him and Professor Li Kuang-ti (李匡悌), to excavate the site.

Between 2019 and 2021, the team unearthed a large number of relics and artefacts, including 51 skeletons, 10 of which were buried in slate coffins with coral funeral objects, Chiu said.

Among the findings were several finished and unfinished shell tools, as well as relics that indicated it was a site for making those tools, which provided proof that the early inhabitants of Eluanbi used “unique” shell-crafting techniques, Chiu said.

The site also offered insights into the funeral customs of the people in those times, he said, adding that anthropologists could also make new discoveries by studying the human remains found at the site.

The skeletal remains and shell tools date back about 4,000 years, which means it is the oldest shell tool site found on any island in the Pacific region, Chiu said, adding that it was also the largest.

Meanwhile, the discovery of an archaeological site on a commercial project has negatively affected the livelihood of the local residents, Chiu said, calling on authorities to find a balance between development and the preservation of cultural heritage sites.

He also urged the local government to address the issue of proper facilities for the exhibition of the artefacts so that people can learn about the archaeological and historical value of the findings.

Coupled with the renovation of the shops, this would help to boost Pingtung’s tourism and the income of its residents, Chiu said.