Achi news desk-
Ancient DNA recovered from the remains of a sixth-century Chinese emperor who reigned during the country’s dark ages has shed some light on what the leader looked like.
Emperor Wu ruled China as part of the Northern Zhou dynasty from 560 to 580 and is credited with unifying the northern part of ancient China during a highly chaotic period.
Archaeologists found his tomb in northwest China in 1996. In a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, researchers analyzed genetic material from his remains, which included an almost complete skull. They received information about his appearance, his health and his genealogy.
The emperor belonged to a little-studied nomadic group called the Xianbei who lived in what is now Mongolia and northern and northeastern China. The analysis of the genome sequenced from the DNA suggested that Wu has brown eyes, black hair and a dark to intermediate skin colour.
“Some scholars said that the Xianbei had ‘exotic’ looks, such as a thick beard, high nose bridge, and blond hair,” Shaoqing Wen, co-author of the study and an associate professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, said in a news release. “Our analysis shows that Emperor Wu had typical East or Northeast Asian facial features.”
The authors said they hoped ancient DNA could shed light on Wu’s cause of death. The emperor died suddenly at the age of 36, according to the study. Explanations for his demise put forward in historical texts include illness and deliberate poisoning.
The team could not find any concrete evidence as to why he died. However, the researchers said they had uncovered a genetic predisposition to stroke, which could explain some of the symptoms historians have attributed to Wu: eyelid drooping, blindness and an affected gait.
Archaeologists are increasingly using ancient DNA techniques to extract information from bones, teeth, artefacts and cave dirt.
Wu rebuilt face
The team used genetic information from the remains, including Wu’s skull, to imagine what he would have looked like, creating a 3D facial reconstruction that humanizes an unknown figure.
“The study … offers interesting insights into the historical figure of Emperor Wu, with the facial approximation presented appearing convincingly realistic,” said Tobias Houlton, a lecturer in craniofacial identification and forensic imaging at the University of Dundee who has working on facial reconstructions of historical figures, via email. He was not part of the study.
“Notably, details of color (skin, hair and eye) cannot be predicted from skeletal remains alone, making genetic analysis a powerful tool.”
However, the study did not provide enough detail about other morphological variables such as the thickness of the skin, the muscles and fat covering the facial bones, the position and projection of the eyeball, the shape of the eyebrows, the width of the nose, and the height of the lips , factors that can be included in facial reconstruction, Houlton said.
The Xianbei: A rarely studied group
More interesting than the emperor’s appearance was his Xianbei ancestry, said Jeong Hoongwon, an associate professor at Seoul National University’s School of Biological Sciences. Jeong, who was not involved in the new research, has studied the Xiongnu, a separate nomadic empire that pushed China to build its Great Wall.
The genetic analysis showed that Emperor Wu married Han Chinese, the main ethnic group in China today.
“I think it’s important to understand the elite group he belonged to, which arose from the merger of Xianbei and local Han elite groups, rather than himself,” Jeong said via email. “This group has rarely been studied in genetics and this study provides one of the first such cases.”
Jeong compared the Xianbei and the Xiongnu to Germanic tribes such as the Franks and the Goths who occupied parts of the Roman Empire as it collapsed.
He said it was notable that Emperor Wu had a relatively high percentage of ancestry from a group known as ancient North Asia, given that the Xianbei had interacted with the dominant Han Chinese for several centuries by then.
Wu ruled during a period of Chinese history often considered a “dark age of chaos,” with dynasties rising and falling rapidly, said Bryan Miller, assistant professor of Central Asian art and archeology at the University of Michigan. Miller, who was not involved in the study, said it was a period of history that warranted more study.
“It’s interesting to see the genetic study, but none of the findings of this genetic study are surprising at all,” Miller said. “We know that the great rulers intermarried, but what about the political substrate – to what extent were the lower elites allowed to intermarry?
“I think that’s where genetics could really start to tell an interesting story.”
