China’s hanging coffins had no known builders. Ancient DNA points to Bo people

The Hanging Coffins at Sagada, PC: Palu Malerba Scattered across remote cliff faces in southern China, wooden coffins have hung suspended for centuries, wedged into rock crevices or resting on driven wooden stakes hundreds of feet above the ground. Who built them, and why they chose height over a conventional grave, remained an open question for generations of archaeologists. A new ancient DNA study, published in the journal Nature Communications, has now traced a direct genetic line between individuals buried in these hanging coffins and the modern Bo people, a small ethnic community that still lives in China's Yunnan province today.How researchers linked China’s hanging coffins to a living populationAccording to the study published in Nature Communications titled Exploration of hanging coffin customs and the Bo people in China through comparative genomics, researchers extracted and sequenced ancient genetic material from 11 individuals recovered from four separate hanging coffin sites in China, with some remains dated to more than 2,000 years old. The team compared this ancient genetic data against DNA collected from 30 living individuals of confirmed Bo descent, allowing them to...