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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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Coffins hanging on the rock walls were considered auspicious by the Bo people, an ethnic group in southeastern China with ancient origins.
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Although the Bo living in this region today did not believe they were related to those who were buried in suspended coffins centuries ago, genome sequencing has shown otherwise.
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Bo’s ancestry has been traced back to ancient peoples living on the southeast coast of China, with some coffin-hanging individuals descended from northern Asian groups.
An unexpected sight can be seen high up on transparent rock walls in parts of southern China and Southeast Asia. What might look like rock outcroppings are actually wooden coffins, cut from tree trunks and hung on the cliff by people who were thought to have disappeared hundreds of years ago.
Hanging coffins are a funeral custom once practiced by the Bo people of southwestern China. Shrouded in mystery, this ancient ethnic group was often hidden from the outside world. They sometimes reached mythic heights in the folklore of nearby locals, who believed they were capable of flight and called them “Subjugators of the Sky” and “Sons of the Rocks”. During the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368 AD), it was written in The Brief Chronicles of Yunnan that “Tall coffins are considered auspicious. The higher they are, the more favorable for the dead. And those whose coffins fell to the ground earlier were considered to be luckier.”
Many of these coffins have remained suspended for hundreds or thousands of years, partly because those who deposited them made sure to support them with wooden stakes driven into cracks and holes in the rock. Historical records of the origins of this practice and of the Bo themselves are fragmentary. Hanging coffins were widespread in the region in ancient times, but eventually died out. Although they have prospered until about 400 years ago, a small Bo community still survives in the mountains of southeastern Yunnan Province.
“Although the practice of the hanging coffin has ceased to appear in the historical record, the genetic traces left behind provide compelling evidence of a common origin and cultural continuity that transcends modern national borders,” said a team of researchers in a study recently published in Nature Communications. “From this region, the practice spread to other parts of China, eventually moving south and west into different cultural zones.”
While modern Bo are not believed to be related to the humans who were thought to be able to fly because of their mortuary practices, researchers have analyzed samples of human remains from individuals found in hanging coffins in Yunnan, Guangxi and Thailand. They then sequenced the genomes of the living Bo population of She De Village and compared their findings to see if there was any genetic link. Most of the individuals in southwest China were genetically similar to the ancestors originally from the coast of southeast China. They were determined to be descendants of the Iron Age Hòabìnhien hunter-gatherers, Yangtze River farmers, and Yellow River peoples.
It was revealed that the ancestors of the Bo people were largely descended from ancient individuals from the Yunnan site, despite the initial doubts of the Bo, who now live in the area. What particularly interested the researchers was that the copper plates, representing the souls of the dead and used in later cave burials, had been in use since the late Ming Dynasty. This aligns with both the practice itself and the documentation of the people behind it declining towards the end of the 16th century.th Century. After the team viewed their findings from an anthropological and archaeological perspective, it is now believed that hanging coffins first appeared among the coastal populations of southeastern China around 3,000 years ago.
Bo’s ancestors have the closest genetic relationship to living speakers of Tai-Kadai and Austronesian languages in East and Southeast Asia. The Tai-Kadai language family includes Thai and Lao, while the Austronesian languages originated in Taiwan and span parts of Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and Oceania. Coffins of similar age, dated to about 1,200 years ago, also showed evidence of a population shift from southern China to northwestern Thailand, supporting these findings. Some ancient individuals in Hanging Coffins also had Northeast Asian ancestry. This suggests that there was much more interaction between the communities that practiced this type of burial than previously assumed.
“Further explorations with additional human remains and archaeological content from these regions, incorporating interdisciplinary scientific perspectives, could contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the history of hanging wooden coffin burial customs in the future,” the researchers said.
Meanwhile, in the sacred rocks of Yunnan, the coffins and memory of the Bo people persist.
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