The Hanging Coffins’ Descendants Still Live in Yunnan: Genetics Reads a 3,000-Year Continuity

On sheer cliff faces across southern China and Southeast Asia hangs a remarkable burial custom: coffins placed high in the rock, left there for a thousand years or more. Whose were they? And where did the people who chose this fate end up? The question has long puzzled researchers.

Hanging-coffin burial lasted more than three millennia and was widely distributed, yet left almost no records that could be matched directly to living descendants. In the past, people could only guess at the occupants’ identity from rock art, place names and scattered texts; proof was hard to come by.

Ancient DNA changed that. A team led by Xiaoming Zhang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology sequenced 15 ancient individuals from cliff-burial sites in China and Thailand, and sampled 30 modern members of the Bo people (now classified within the Yi) from Qiubei County, Yunnan. The comparison was striking: the two groups share up to 79% of their ancestry.

In other words, the people on the cliffs and the Bo people living today in Yunnan’s valleys are of the same lineage. Combining this with archaeology, the authors suggest 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.

This makes “lost civilization” an inaccurate phrase. A burial custom may look as silent as the cliffs themselves, but its people passed their blood, their memory and certain ritual habits down through the generations. To read that 79% is to read a continuity stretching across 3,000 years—and still unfolding.

Source: Xiaoming Zhang team (popular-science rewrite). Nature Communications, 2025-11-21.