Imperial lineage DNA collected
- Source: Global Times
- [09:44 July 14 2010]
- Comments
By Liu Dong
Two professors from Fudan University will complete a large-scale collection of DNA Thursday as part of a project to verify the identity of remains recovered from an ancient imperial tomb.
Last December, an ancient tomb was discovered by archaeologists in Anyang, Henan Province. The archaeologists claimed the tomb was that of Cao Cao, an emperor during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history (220-280). However, the high degree of degradation to the tomb and the body inhabiting it led others to question its identity.
Han Sheng, professor from Fudan's department of history, and Li Hui, associate professor of Fudan's school of life science, decided to throw light on the mystery by collecting and then analyzing DNA samples of people identified as ancestors of Cao Cao through written records.
"In February, we started to trace the offspring of Cao Cao according to the historical documents and the family trees preserved in the government libraries," Han told the Global Times Tuesday.
Li explained the theory behind the process relied on the fact that the sex-defining Y chromosome is passed down from father to son. Collecting enough DNA samples of Cao Cao's male descendants would allow them to compare the Y chromosomes with those of the remains discovered in the tomb. A positive match would identify the remains as being of the same family line.
Li added that, according to records, there were 275 family trees that could have belonged to Cao Cao's family in the country, with records for 118 of them stored at Shanghai Library. The professors mapped the distribution of these possible descendants and sent teams to collect DNA samples over the past few months.
Although Li said thousands of samples have been collected across the country, some people still doubt the credibility of the experiment.
Wang Yuedan, professor of Peking University Health Science Center, wrote on his personal blog that "it is nonsense for a national key laboratory to do such an experiment," and that it was "technically flawed."
However, Li brushed off such criticism as being "just the opinion of some amateurs and non-professionals in my field of study," and said the research had a wider application.
"Through unscrambling the Cao line's DNA code, we can get a whole picture of Cao Cao's descendants' migration and distribution, which could lead us to understand the migration of Chinese people from a new angle," Han said.
Li added that the project is part of a world-wide human family tree program organized by National Geographic magazine.
