We're thrilled to share that Christina (Tina) Warinner, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, is the co-senior author of a groundbreaking article, titled "Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales," published in the journal Science Advances last week.
Read the article here.
The article has received widespread media attention, including in Science, Nature, and CNN. See below for links to the coverage.
Science: “Politically savvy princesses wove together a vast ancient empire,” by Andrew Curry, April 14, 2023.
Nature: “Burials reveal women’s high status in ancient Mongolia,” April 14, 2023.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01283-8
CNN: “Ancient DNA reveals secrets of empire that pushed China to build its Great Wall,” by Katie Hunt, April 17, 2023.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/asia/xiongnu-ancient-dna-study-scn/index.html
About: Christina Warinner
Christina (Tina) Warinner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. She is also a group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and affiliated with the faculty of biological sciences at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.
Warinner specializes in biomolecular archaeology, with an emphasis on reconstructing the prehistory of human foods and the evolution of the microbiome. She is known for her pioneering work in ancient DNA and proteins research, which has contributed significant insights into prehistoric human health, the ancestral human microbiome, the origins of dairying, and past human population history. In 2014 she published the first detailed metagenomic and metaproteomic characterization of the ancient human oral microbiome, and in 2015, she published a seminal study on the identification of milk proteins in ancient dental calculus and the reconstruction of prehistoric European dairying practices. In the same year, she was also part of a research team that published the first South American hunter-gatherer gut microbiome and identified Treponema as a key missing ancestral microbe in the gut microbiome of industrialized societies. Later, she demonstrated that full mitochondrial genomes could be recovered from dental calculus, opening new opportunities for less destructive methods of collaborative paleogenomics research with Native American tribes and communities. In 2016 she and her colleagues reconstructed the early population history of the Himalayas and published the first complete genomes of ancient East Asians, and in 2018 her team identified the earliest direct evidence of dairying on the East Asian steppe. Her work has additionally contributed to identifying the cause of the 1545 Mexican cocoliztli epidemic and to revealing the roles of women in medieval book production. She is currently leading a large multidisciplinary project in Mongolia combining archaeology, ethnography, microbiology, and microbiome sciences to understand the origins of dairying and the rich and complex history of human cultural and biological adaptations to novel foods.