A team in China used ancient DNA to reconstruct the face of an emperor who reigned 1,500 years ago. Emperor Wu was the ruler of the Northern Zhou dynasty from 560 to 578 CE. The facial reconstruction is detailed in a study published March 28 in the journal Current Biology. The study sheds light on Emperor Wu’s potential cause of death and the migration pattern of a nomadic empire that once ruled parts of northeastern Asia.
As a ruler, Emperor Wu is known for building a strong military and unifying a northern part of China after defeating the Northern Qi dynasty. Emperor Wu’s tomb was discovered in northwestern China in 1996. Archaeologists found several bones, including a nearly complete skull.
Since then, ancient DNA research techniques have advanced and the team from this new study was able to recover over 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on his DNA. Each SNP–or snip–represents a difference in a single building block of DNA. SNPs occur normally throughout DNA and each human genome has about four to five million of them. To be classified as an SNP, the variant must be found in at least one percent of the population. There are more than 600 million SNPs in populations from all over the world.
[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]
The team found SNPs that contained information about Emperor Wu’s hair and skin color. Historians believe he was ethnically Xianbei–an ancient nomadic group primarily found in present day Mongolia and northern and northeastern China.
“Some scholars said the Xianbei had ‘exotic’ looks, such as thick beard, high nose bridge, and yellow hair,” study co-author and Fudan University bioarchaeologist Shaoqing Wen said in a statement. “Our analysis shows Emperor Wu had typical East or Northeast Asian facial characteristics,” he adds.
With the SNP data and Emperor Wu’s skull, the team reconstructed…
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