The City of Skulls and Fathers: Ancient DNA Reshapes the Story of Shimao’s Neolithic World

The Bones That Guarded a Stone City

On a rise overlooking the northern edge of the Loess Plateau, the Neolithic residents of Shimao built walls out of giant limestone blocks, carved fierce faces onto the stones, and arranged their dead in patterns only now coming into view. Archaeologists have long known the site as one of the most sprawling and enigmatic late Neolithic centers in East Asia. But its people remained a mystery: who they were, where they came from, and how they organized power in a community that practiced both agriculture and ritual killing.

Carving stone at Shimao city. Credit: IVPP

A new study in Nature,¹ drawing on more than a decade of intensive excavation and the sequencing of 144 ancient genomes, offers the clearest portrait yet of the society behind Shimao’s massive ramparts. The work shows that Shimao’s builders descended largely from older populations of the Loess Plateau, maintained strong patrilineal traditions, interacted intermittently with steppe groups, and carried out highly structured, gender-specific forms of human sacrifice.

The settlement, active roughly 4200 to 3700 years ago, now emerges not as an isolated, spectacular outlier but as a community negotiating ancestry, exchange, violence, and hierarchy at a scale previously unmatched in Neolithic China.

“Shimao illustrates how early political centers could grow from local roots while still absorbing distant influences,” says Dr. Yuting Zhao, an archaeologist at the University of Hong Kong. “Its history intertwines the rhythms of farming, mobility, and ritual into a single social landscape.”