Genetics Trace the Living Descendants of China’s Ancient Hanging Coffin Culture

A team led by Professor Xiaoming Zhang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has used comparative genomics to link the thousands-year-old hanging-coffin burial tradition of southern China and Southeast Asia directly to the modern Bo people of Yunnan. The findings appear in Nature Communications (s41467-025-65264-3).

The researchers sequenced 15 ancient individuals from cliff-burial sites in China and Thailand, alongside 30 members of the modern Bo people (Bo, now classified within the Yi) of Qiubei County, Yunnan. The ancient hanging-coffin people and the modern Bo share up to 79% of their ancestry—a striking degree of genetic continuity.

Together with archaeological evidence, the authors argue that the hanging-coffin tradition arose around 3,600 years ago in the Wuyi Mountains of southeast China, then spread west into Yunnan and south into Thailand and Laos. Two roughly 1,200-year-old individuals from the Washi site in Yunnan also carry Northeast Asian and Yellow River components, showing that other populations layered onto this dispersal route over time.

The result means the hanging-coffin world was not a lost civilization: its descendants still live in Yunnan today, and burial custom, genes and ethnic identity together form a rare, nearly complete chain of evidence.

Source: Xiaoming Zhang et al. Nature Communications, s41467-025-65264-3, 2025-11-21.