The Stone City of Shimao

On the loess hills of northern Shaanxi stands the largest walled settlement of Neolithic China: some 400 hectares of stone ramparts around a terraced pyramidal core at Huangchengtai, with relief carvings, jades set into the masonry and pits of sacrificed young women beneath the gates. Shimao overturned the assumption that Chinese urbanism began on the central plains. Its people, the genomes show, descended largely from a Yangshao-related population that had lived in the same region a thousand years earlier, a continuity that survived gene flow from Inner Mongolia. Pedigrees ran four generations deep, patrilineal and patrilocal; the tomb owners of Zhaishan almost all shared the paternal line O3a2c while their maternal lines were diverse. The sacrificial victims, sorted by sex and place, were generally unrelated to the tomb owners. These twelve were buried across the Shimao complex and at nearby Xinhua.

The genome-wide data behind this entry was published in Ancient DNA from Shimao city records kinship practices in Neolithic China.

Every Ancestry Map includes the free Notable Matches lens: your coordinates are compared to every sequenced member of every catalog entry, and the distance to the closest member is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional space the Distance lens uses. Because these are a small group of real individuals, not a population average, distances naturally run larger than population distances. That is expected, not a poor result. And one thing is never claimed: a small distance means similar ancestry composition, not that the Stone City of Shimao are your ancestor. See how it looks in the live demo or read about Ancestry Map, the full Global25 report.

• 01

  Who were the Stone City of Shimao?

  The Stone City of Shimao (c. 2150-1800 BCE, Shimao, Shenmu, Shaanxi, China) are one of the Iconic discoveries entries in our Notable Matches catalog, represented by 12 sequenced ancient genomes published in the study "Ancient DNA from Shimao city records kinship practices in Neolithic China".

• 02

  What does "matching" the Stone City of Shimao mean?

  Your Global25 coordinates are compared to the entry's sequenced members and the distance to the closest one is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional reference space the Distance lens uses. A notable entry is one person or one small burial group, not a population average, so distances naturally run larger than population distances.

• 03

  Are they my ancestor?

  No, and no DNA test can show that. A small distance means your genome sits near theirs in a shared reference space: similar ancestry composition, not descent. Ancestrify never claims a notable individual is your ancestor or relative.

• 04

  How do I see my own distance to the Stone City of Shimao?

  Notable Matches is a free lens on every Ancestry Map, never sold separately. Order Ancestry Map, our Global25 analysis (29.99 EUR), and your report ranks your coordinates against the full catalog, with a portrait, dossier and map for every entry. The public demo shows the lens with example data.

The catalog holds every published entry across three tiers. Browse the full Notable Matches directory. Nearby entries:

• Inuk of Greenlandc. 2000 BCE

• The Tarim Basin Mummiesc. 2100-1700 BCE

• The Minoansc. 2900-1200 BCE

• The Mokrin Necropolisc. 2100-1800 BCE

• The Oxus Civilisation of Gonurc. 2250-1800 BCE

• The Cetina Culturec. 2200-1600 BCE

• The Kingdom of El Argarc. 2200-1550 BCE

• The Únětice Culturec. 2200-1600 BCE

• The Old Babyloniansc. 1900-1600 BCE

• The Bronze Age Anatolians of Kaman-Kalehöyükc. 2000-1500 BCE

• Theopetra Cavec. 2250 BCE

• The Kingdom of Eblac. 2700-1800 BCE