“We set out to integrate genetics and archaeology in a new way,” noted Warinner, who is also the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. “One of the most exciting things about the study is offering a fresh perspective on this much-maligned population.”
The Xiongnu, contemporaries of the peoples of ancient Egypt and Rome, dominated the Mongolian steppe from about 200 B.C. to 100 A.D. These horseback nomads proved innovative in warfare, but historians know little about the inner workings of their culture because the Xiongnu never developed a formal writing system. “Most of what we know comes from the Han Dynasty of Imperial China,” Warinner said. “They were major rivals of the Xiongnu, and they wrote about their wars and skirmishes along the border.”
In fact, the Great Wall was built as a barrier to mounted Xiongnu warriors.
Also detailed in historic documents are the Xiongnu’s powerful women. “That was another reason Imperial China didn’t like them,” Warinner quipped.
“I think what we’re seeing is that as armies of Xiongnu warriors were going out and expanding the empire, elite women were governing the borders.”
— Christina Warinner, associate professor of anthropology
Physical evidence of these claims has been hard to come by. “In most places in the world, the archaeological record abounds in residential domestic debris,” Warinner said. “The problem with mobile societies is they don’t stay anywhere long enough to build up that kind of archaeological record.”
What the Xiongnu did leave behind are vast mortuary complexes, elaborately built from stone and visible from miles away — they even show up on satellite imagery. It’s been well over 10 years since archaeologists Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan and Bryan K. Miller excavated two such burial sites, located at the western edge of the Xiongnu empire (in Mongolia’s present-day Khovd Province, not far from the border with China). Artifacts recovered there include fine silk, glass beads, and lacquered vessels. “The Xiongnu valued far-flung trade goods,” Warinner said. “They were an early globalizing society.”
Miller subsequently worked with Warinner on an enormous study, published in 2020, that reconstructed the genetic history of Mongolia over a span of 6,000 years. That meant sequencing the DNA of human remains recovered from archaeological sites across the windswept country. “At the time, we only analyzed one or two individuals per site,” said Warinner. “From that, we could tell the Xiongnu were genetically diverse and multiethnic. But we weren’t able to say anything about their gender or social roles or about whether there was a relationship between their genetics and social status.”
Understanding the “internal dynamics” of Xiongnu communities would require a new line of inquiry. As Bayarsaikhan and Miller saw it, this could be accomplished via cross-disciplinary research at the burial sites. With the archaeological work complete, Warinner signed on to lead the genetic lab work while analysis was done by Juhyeon Lee, a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University and lead author on the new paper.
