美国人类遗传学杂志关于匈奴DNA研究的原文

蓝天雄鹰

2003年   美国人类遗传学杂志的原文
Am. J. Hum. Genet. 73:247–260, 2003
Nuclear and Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of a 2,000-Year-Old Necropolis
in the Egyin Gol Valley of Mongolia
Christine Keyser-Tracqui,1 Eric Crube′zy,2 and Bertrand Ludes1,2
1Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Mole′culaire, Institut de Me′decine Le′gale, Strasbourg, France, and 2Anthropobiologie, Universite′ Paul Sabatier,
CNRS, UMR 8555, Toulouse, France
DNA was extracted from the skeletal remains of 62 specimens excavated from the Egyin Gol necropolis, in northern
Mongolia. This burial site is linked to the Xiongnu period and was used from the 3rd century B.C. to the 2nd
century A.D. Three types of genetic markers were used to determine the genetic relationships between individuals
buried in the Egyin Gol necropolis. Results from analyses of autosomal and Y chromosome short tandem repeats,
as well as mitochondrial DNA, showed close relationships between several specimens and provided additional
background information on the social organization within the necropolis as well as the funeral practices of the
Xiongnu people. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using biparental, paternal, and maternal
genetic systems to reconstruct partial genealogies in a protohistoric necropolis.

Introduction
In recent years, molecular studies have become widely employed to investigate parentage relationships within
burial groups (Fily et al. 1998; Stone and Stoneking 1999; Schultes et al. 2000; Clisson et al. 2002), because
morphological indicators of kinship are much less precise than the genetic data potentially available by analysis of ancient DNA. Understanding genetic relationships within and between burial sites helps us to
understand the organization of sepulchral places and the origin of human remains recovered (e.g., unrelated individuals or members of a single or a limited number of family groups). This should be the first step of any work
devoted to the history of settlement based on the investigation of remains from a cemetery, because every external inclusion in a group of subjects sharing a common parentage may introduce a bias (Crube′zy et al. 2000).
In the present study, we examined biological kinship in a necropolis from the Xiongnu period, a culture
known mainly through the graves discovered in 1943 by a joint Mongolian-Russian expedition in the Noin-Ula Mountains in northern Mongolia (Rudenko 1970) but also through other funerary sites of the Selenge Basin (Konovalov 1976). The Xiongnu were an ancient nomadic Turkomongolian tribe who were first described in Chinese manuscripts as early as the 4th century B.C. Received February 26, 2003; accepted for publication May 7, 2003;
electronically published July 10, 2003.
Address for correspondence and reprints: Dr. Christine Keyser-Tracqui, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Mole′culaire, Institut de Me′decine Le′gale, 11, rue Humann, 67085 Strasbourg Cedex, France. E-mail: ckeyser@mageos.com
. 2003 by The American Society of Human Genetics. All rights reserved.
0002-9297/2003/7302-0004$15.00
(Minajev 1996). In the 3rd century B.C., Xiongnu tribes rose to great power and created the first empire governed by Central Asian nomads. They ruled over a territory that extended from Lake Baikal in the north to the Gobi desert in the south and from western Manchuria in the east to the Pamirs in the west. During the newly established Han dynasty (206 B.C.to A.D. 220), China expanded its borders, and the Xiongnu empire lost ground (Marx 2000).
According to radiocarbon dating, the Egyin Gol site was used from the 3rd century B.C. to the 2nd century
A.D. (i.e., over the whole Xiongnu period). It is located in northern Mongolia, in a cold environment favorable
to a good preservation of the DNA (Burger et al. 1999; Leonard et al. 2000). We studied genetic diversity at the
Egyin Gol site, first by use of autosomal STRs. Autosomal STRs consist of tandemly organized repeats of
short nucleotide patterns (2–6 bp), which are transmitted according to a Mendelian mode of inheritance.
These genetic markers took precedence in our study, owing to their excellent power of discrimination for the
study of close parentage relationships. They also represent propitious markers for ancient DNA studies because of their small size and because they allow detection of sample contamination (Hummel et al. 2000).
Moreover, they can be simultaneously amplified, reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of sample material necessary for kinship analysis. Although both maternal and paternal genetic contributions can be assessed
with autosomal markers, such as STRs, we also studied the genetic diversity by typing the nonrecombining part
of the Y chromosome, as well as the hypervariable region I (HVI) of the mtDNA. We studied paternal and maternal
transmitted polymorphisms to complete the data obtained by autosomal STR analyses and, above all, to
confirm the authenticity of the molecular data obtained from the ancient Egyin Gol specimens. These polymorphisms also provided additional information on the genetic history of the Xiongnu tribes. Material and Methods