Why Were Most Sacrificed Individuals at Shimao Male? Reading a 4,300-Year-Old Society from Ancient DNA

Amid the loess ravines of northern Shaanxi lies Shimao, a vast stone-walled city of about 4 square kilometers dating to roughly 4,300 years ago. Beneath its walls and within its gates, archaeologists have found layers of human skulls. Whose heads were these? In the past, scholars could only speculate.

The debate centered on sex. Drawing on comparable finds elsewhere, some guessed that most sacrificial victims were female; others argued the opposite. But guesswork is just that. Bone weathers, and sex can be assessed reliably from only a few skeletal features such as the pelvis, so errors creep in once the sample grows large.

Ancient DNA returned a counterintuitive answer. After genome analysis of about 80 skulls from Shimao’s East Gate, the researchers found that roughly nine in ten sacrificial victims were male. The pits beneath the city gate were filled, overwhelmingly, with men.

The contrast is what makes this fascinating. In elite burial areas such as the imperial-mausoleum platform, the victims were predominantly female. Within a single city, different locations show entirely different gender patterns—suggesting that East Gate rituals and elite burial rites drew on two different groups of people.

The study also reconstructed, from the genes, a four-generation patrilineal, patrilocal family lineage: descent traced through men, with couples remaining on the husband’s ancestral land. Read together, male-line inheritance and the mostly-male East Gate sacrifices make the rules of Shimao’s 4,000-year-old society suddenly much clearer.

This is the power of ancient DNA. It does not only tell us where people came from; from individual bones it can read how a prehistoric city arranged its power, its hierarchy and its rituals.

Source: Qiaomei Fu team (popular-science rewrite). People’s Daily Online / Xinhua, 2025-11-28.