A mountain of male skulls at the gates of an ancient city in China shocked scientists

It turned out that at the eastern gate of the city in the Neolithic massively sacrificed men, not women, as long believed before.

The results are published in the journal Nature.

Shimao existed about 4200-3700 years ago. It was a large fortified city of about 4 square kilometres. The ruling elite, artisans, and farmers lived there. Archaeologists had long known that there were human sacrifices in Shimao, but did not understand who exactly was sacrificed and how people's lives were organised.

A team led by Prof Fu Qiaomei studied the region for 13 years. The scientists took DNA from the bones of 169 people from Shimao and neighbouring settlements. In this way they were able to find out who was related to whom, where the population came from and how their lives were organised.

The most high-profile find is about 80 human skulls discovered at the eastern gate. Previously, archaeologists thought that mostly women were sacrificed. But genetic analyses have shown: about 9 out of 10 victims here were men. Women associated with sacrificial rituals are more common in elite cemeteries elsewhere in the complex. This means that the rituals were strictly segregated by gender and location, with some victims at the gates and others in the "prestige" areas.

The DNA also showed that the inhabitants of Shimao were mostly descended from local farmers who lived here a thousand years before the city flourished. But they also had genetic links with other groups: the Taoxi culture in the south of Shanxi province, steppe peoples and people from the southern rice regions. So Shimao was not an isolated city, but part of a larger network of contacts and exchanges.

The researchers emphasise: this is the first such detailed genetic data that allows us to talk not only about the origins of people, but also about how power was transmitted, what ruling families and social strata looked like in the origins of early East Asian states.