100,000 Years of East Asians: How Molecular Archaeology Reads Prehistory as a Migration Map
2025年12月30日
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2026年1月6日Maternal Genomes of the Qijia Culture: Female Lineages on the Gansu-Qinghai Prehistoric Corridor
A team led by Yinqiu Cui at Jilin University’s Bioarchaeology Laboratory has published mitochondrial genomes of the Qijia culture, a Bronze Age society that flourished in the Gansu-Qinghai region around 2300–1500 BCE. Sitting on a key corridor between East Asian farming worlds and the Eurasian steppe, the Qijia have long been poorly understood on the maternal side.
The researchers reconstructed mitogenomes from Qijia individuals, mapping out maternal diversity and tracing how female lineages influenced later East Asian populations—especially those associated with the permanent settlement of the Tibetan Plateau. The results place the Gansu-Qinghai corridor at the heart of east-west interaction, with Qijia maternal ancestry woven into a wider web of prehistoric movement.
The study offers a maternal-genetic perspective on Bronze Age exchange between East Asia and the steppe, and argues that discussions of cultural transmission should also weigh the migrations and fusions recorded in female lineages.
Source: Chunxiang Li, Jian Li, Shizhu Gao et al.; corresponding Yinqiu Cui. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2026-01-06.
