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This skull belonged to a man who held a prominent position in the Xiongnu Empire.
Mongolian skeleton, western man
2,000-year-old DNA suggests early Indo-European migration
By Bruce Bower
Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they
speak in a whispered double helix.
Consider an older gentleman whose
skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs
recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old
cemetery for the elite in eastern Mongolia. DNA extracted from this man’s bones
pegs him as a descendant of Europeans
or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a
prominent position in ancient Mongolia’s
Xiongnu Empire, say Kyung-Yong Kim of
Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South
Korea, and his colleagues.
Previous excavations and descriptions
in ancient Chinese texts led researchers
to suspect that the Xiongnu
Empire — which ruled a
vast territory in and around
Mongolia from 209 B.C. to
A.D. 93 — included ethnically
and linguistically diverse
nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu
Empire once ruled the major
trading route known as the
Asian Silk Road, opening the empire to
both Western and Chinese influences.
Researchers have yet to pin down the
language spoken by Xiongnu rulers and
political elites, says archaeologist David
Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta,
N. Y. But the new genetic evidence shows
that the 2,000-year-old skeleton belonged
to a man who “was multiethnic, like the
Xiongnu polity itself,” Anthony says.
On his Y chromosome (inherited from
paternal ancestors), this long-dead man
possessed a set of genetic mutations that
commonly appears today among male
speakers of Indo-European languages in
northeastern Europe, central Asia and
northern India, Kim’s team reports in an
upcoming American Journal of Physical
Anthropology. The man displayed a pat-
tern of mitochondrial DNA mutations,
inherited from maternal ancestors, char-
acteristic of speakers of modern Indo-
European languages in central Asia.
“We don’t know if this 60- to 70-year-
old man reached Mongolia on his own
or if his family had already
lived there for many genera-
tions,” says study coauthor
Charles Brenner, a DNA
analyst in Oakland, Calif.
The man’s genetic sig-
nature supports the idea
that Indo-European migra-
tions to northeastern Asia
started before 2,000 years ago. This
notion is plausible but not confirmed,
says geneticist Peter Underhill of Stan-
ford University. Further investigations of
Y chromosome mutation frequencies in
modern populations will allow for a more
precise tracing of the man’s geographic
roots, Underhill predicts.
Gold ornaments
were found with the
ancient skeleton.
Running barefoot
cushions impact
of forces on foot
Too soon to say if shoeless
approach reduces injuries
By Laura Sanders
The clothes don’t make the man, but
wearing no shoes might make the runner. A study of people who habitually run
barefoot shows that these runners’ feet
strike the ground in a way that tempers
impact forces and smooths the running
movement, reports a study appearing
online January 27 in Nature.
Though the results suggest that barefoot running might have benefits, it’s too
soon to say whether this style is less likely
to cause injuries, the researchers say.
“One shouldn’t be scared of barefoot
or minimal shoe running or think it odd,”
says study coauthor Daniel Lieberman of
Harvard University. “From an evolution-
ary perspective, it’s normal and, if done
properly, it is very fun and comfortable.
We evolved to run barefoot.”
The new study is elegant and offers a
good example of the mechanics of dif-
ferent running gaits, comments Daniel
Schmitt, an evolutionary anthropologist
at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
Earlier studies suggested that people
running barefoot land on the front or
middle of the foot first, before lowering
the heel and transitioning body weight
to the back of the foot. The invention of
the springy running shoe in the 1970s, the
study’s authors write, allowed runners
to land comfortably on the heel before
rolling weight forward on the foot. Shoe
cushioning distributed the impact force,
making the heel strike bearable. (
Sprinters run primarily on their forefeet, but the
mechanics of sprinting are different.)
Lieberman and colleagues traveled to
the Rift Valley Province in Kenya and
videotaped the movement styles of some
