Chinese archeology continues to reveal forgotten parts of its past. Amid the monumental ruins of a Bronze Age city, dozens of carefully aligned human skulls pose a disturbing question. Far from ancient interpretations, human sacrifices at Shimao appear today as the reflection of a hierarchical, ritualized power, deeply anchored in space and in bodies.
A fortified city where architecture embraces violence
On the dry lands of Shaanxi province, a forgotten 4,000-year-old city resurfaces piece by piece. Named Shimao, this Neolithic city surrounded by massive walls has fascinated people since its rediscovery. It extended over almost 4 square kilometers, with a central pyramid, artisanal areas, hierarchical cemeteries and urban planning that rivals that of the first civilizations of the Near East.
But it is at the very threshold of the city that the past hits hardest. Under the foundations of the eastern gate, Dongmen, archaeologists discovered a pit containing around 80 human skulls. No complete skeletons, only heads. For a long time, the morphology of the bones suggested a predominantly female sacrifice, linked to funerary rites. However, genetic analyzes directly contradict this hypothesis.
A monumental study, published in the journal Nature and carried out by Qiaomei Fu's team, reveals that nine of the ten individuals sacrificed in this pit were men. This discovery transforms the interpretation of the site. The violence was not only symbolic, it was ritualized, gendered, organized around the city's infrastructure. Human sacrifice became an act of architecture as much as a political gesture.
Human sacrifices at Shimao reveal a gendered logic
The city of Shimao practiced two forms of ritual killing. On the one hand, collective sacrifices like that of Dongmen, where the decapitated heads were probably linked to founding ceremonies. On the other hand, individual funerary sacrifices, integrated into the tombs of elites, found notably at Huangchengtai or Hanjiagedan. And there, the profile of the victims radically reverses.
In the tombs of notables, it is mainly women who accompany the deceased of high rank. Unrelated, they were buried alongside them, sometimes decorated with artisanal objects, but without any sign of filiation. According to archaeologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this radical difference between the two types of sacrifice suggests a gendered distribution of rituals: for men, public beheading; for women, companionship in death. A strictly structured sacrificial order, inscribed in space as well as in bodies.
Far from being ritual chaos, these practices respond to precise logics. The Dongmen pit, located at a nerve center of the city, could mark a symbolic border, a sort of blood pact to protect the entrance to the city. Female burials would underline the permanence of hereditary power, where the prestigious dead surround themselves with human offerings to prolong their status in the afterlife.
A society based on lineage and patrilineal transmission
Beyond the horror of the sacrifices, it is the DNA of the living and the dead that illuminates the social structure of Shimao. The researchers analyzed 144 ancient genomes, reconstructing family trees spanning up to four generations. They reveal a strictly patrilineal society, in which the most sumptuous tombs go to men of the same lineage. All or almost all share the same paternal haplogroup (O3a2c), while maternal diversity is much higher. This genetic imbalance betrays a frequent practice of female exogamy.
In the great funerary lines of Zhaishan or Hanjiagedan, the women never seem to come from local families. No direct mother, sister or daughter appears in the DNA sequences. This detail is not trivial. He suggests that the women came from elsewhere, married men from Shimao, but passed on neither name nor status. Power, funerary goods, and even the right to be accompanied by sacrificial victims, followed the male line.
Certain individual cases confirm this rigid hierarchy. A woman sacrificed at Zhaishan bore genetic traces of a consanguineous union, probably the daughter of unions between cousins. But far from coming from the elite, she was only very weakly linked to the owners of the tombs. Conversely, high-ranking men show strong ties from father to son, including in the spatialization of tombs.
Through the examination of these bodies, a model of complex Neolithic organization emerges. Shimao was neither a tribe nor a primitive village. It was a stratified, territorially organized, ritualized society, where human sacrifice responded to logics of power, gender and filiation. As LiveScience indicates, the genetic study of these skulls profoundly modifies our vision of prehistoric societies. Their violence was not the fruit of anarchy, but a cog in politics.
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