Ancient Yellow River Ancestry and Divergent Admixture Histories of the Qiang People: A Full-Genome Reconstruction

The Qiang are a long-documented people of Southwest China’s ethnic corridor, and their relationship to neighboring Han and Tibetan groups has long drawn the attention of anthropologists and geneticists. A team led by Xu Shuhua of Fudan University, together with the Institute of Medical Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, reports in Science Advances a full-genome study of 20 Qiang individuals from Maoxian, Sichuan, compared with roughly 450 ancient and modern East Asian genomes.

The central finding is that the Qiang are not genetically uniform. The data split them into two subgroups: one (Qiang_H) closer to Han people, another (Qiang_T) closer to Tibetans. The divergence between the two even exceeds that between southern and northern Han. Yet both Qiang groups share ancestry tracing back about 5,300 years to the Miaozigou culture of the middle and upper Yellow River. In other words, the Qiang “root” lies in the ancient Yellow River basin, while the split happened at the edge of the plateau.

In historical times the two groups followed different admixture paths. Qiang_H received repeated gene flow from Han populations, whereas Qiang_T interacted with Tibetan Empire–related groups. This pattern of “common origin, divergent streams” offers direct evidence for how peoples in the southwest corridor took shape between the Han and Tibetan worlds.

The study also highlights a notable locus. Within ANKRD36, the authors identify a missense mutation (rs143216880) originating around 46,000 years ago that is retained at high frequency only among the Qiang, rare in Han, and nearly absent in Tibetans and most world populations. Because ANKRD36 is linked to blood-pressure regulation, the researchers suggest this ancient haplotype may have helped the Qiang adapt to chronic hypoxia at mid-to-high elevations.

Taken together, the work reconstructs a Qiang genetic history “rooted in the Yellow River, diverging at the plateau’s edge,” adding full-genome evidence to our understanding of the southwest ethnic corridor and the genetic foundations of China’s pluralistic unity.

Source: Weishun Zeng, Zhaoqing Yang, Yan Lu et al.; corresponding Jiayou Chu, Shuhua Xu. Science Advances, 2026-01-15.