Scattered across remote cliff faces in southern China, wooden coffins have hung suspended for centuries, wedged into rock crevices or resting on driven wooden stakes hundreds of feet above the ground. Who built them, and why they chose height over a conventional grave, remained an open question for generations of archaeologists. A new ancient DNA study, published in the journal Nature Communications, has now traced a direct genetic line between individuals buried in these hanging coffins and the modern Bo people, a small ethnic community that still lives in China's Yunnan province today.
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