Archaeologists unearth lost fortress of Genghis Khan in western Mongolia

Japanese and Mongolian archaeologists said Feb. 26 that they have discovered the remains of a 13th-century military outpost established for Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227) in southwestern Mongolia.

The joint research team said the discovery could be useful in learning about the Mongol Empire’s strategy on western expansion and trade routes.

“We hope the discovery will be useful in ascertaining the history of the Mongolian Plateau between the 13th and 14th centuries,” said team leader Koichi Matsuda, professor emeritus of Mongol Empire history at Osaka International University. The researchers surveyed ruins about 880 kilometers west of Ulan Bator in 2001 and found that geographical features around them were similar to the landscape depicted in a travel book written by a medieval Chinese Taoism leader.

The researchers also unearthed pieces of Chinese ceramics dating to the 13th century. An aerial photograph taken in 2001 shows the remains of a fortress surrounded by a soil wall, measuring 200 meters by 200 meters. Last summer, the archaeologists used carbon dating to determine the age of unearthed wood chips and animal bones found at the site. The analysis showed the wood pieces were from the 12th to 13th century, while the bones were estimated to date to the 14th century.

Based on the findings, the archaeologists concluded the items were from a castle that was used as a military base when Genghis Khan was leading the bloody invasion of countries in central Asia.

The fortress is said to have been commissioned by a close aide to Genghis Khan in 1212. Although researchers from various countries have pointed to multiple areas as the former site of the castle, the actual location of the facility had not been confirmed.
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Reference:

Imai, Kunihiko. 2015. “Archaeologists unearth lost fortress of Genghis Khan in western Mongolia”. The Asahi Shimbun. Posted: February 27, 2015. Available online: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201502270082

It’s Not Genghis Khan’s Mongolia

For all of his victories and skills, Genghis Khan always insisted that the god Tengri — the Eternal Blue Sky — deserved the credit for his triumphant success in uniting the vast Mongol Empire in the early 13th century.

Now 21st-century science may be proving him right. Not long ago, researchers studying ancient tree rings found evidence that the Great Khan rose to power during an exceptionally mild 15-year stretch.

Back-to-back years of plentiful rain and favorable temperatures — known as pluvials, the opposite of droughts — promoted vegetation growth, the researchers believe, and that in turn supported the livestock needed to power an army.

“The Mongol Empire pluvial was quite exceptional in its duration,” said Neil Pederson, an ecologist at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. “It was the only one in the past 1,000 years that lasted more than 10 years, so it’s really a singular event.”

These days, Mongolia’s climatic tides have been shifting toward another extreme. A 10-year drought and heat wave from 2000 to 2010, according to the tree ring data, was the most severe the country had had in a millennium.

“I’m more and more convinced that the only way we can understand this 21st-century event is within the context of climate change,” said Amy Hessl, a geographer at West Virginia University. “And the human side of that — combined with a constellation of other factors — is going to be incredible.”

Today, Mongolia is largely herders, not warriors. Sandwiched between Russia and China, it has almost three million people in a vast tract of desert and rolling steppe grassland, punctuated by mountains and forests. Climate continues to significantly shape the lives of Genghis Khan’s descendants, around one-third of whom still practice the seminomadic herding of their ancestors, moving their house — traditionally, a dome-shaped tent called a ger — with the seasons.

While televisions and solar panels are a common sight in modern gers, herders still rely on thousands of years of collective knowledge to thrive in the harsh Mongolian environment, where the temperature regularly dips below minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. Yet the predictable ebb and flow of warmth and cold, rain and snow, has begun to falter in recent years.

“I don’t know why the weather has become unusual, but I’m very worried about it,” said Urgamaltsetsg Suvita, 47, a herder in the Gobi Desert. Summer is hotter and drier and plagued by sandstorms, she said, and winter brings too much snow or too little.

In 2010, an extreme snowstorm killed her flock of livestock — nearly 1,000 animals, including horses, sheep and goats. “Winter is no longer winter,” she said.

Like much of the world, Mongolia is already experiencing the effects of climate change. The country’s average annual temperature has risen more than 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1940; paradoxically, winter months have grown colder over the past 20 years. Streams and lakes have begun to dry up, and fires frequently blaze across millions of acres of steppe and forest.

“The steppe ecosystem is burning and burning and burning,” said Oyunsanaa Byambasuren, a lecturer in forestry at the National University of Mongolia. “But we really don’t have enough specialists or professionals dealing with those issues.”

Dzuds — extreme winter events that cause mass livestock die-offs — also seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity. From 1999 to 2002, a succession of winter dzuds followed by summer droughts killed 30 percent of all livestock in Mongolia, and a 2010 dzud claimed 8.8 million livestock — losses equivalent to 4.4 percent of the country’s economic output.

“Wealth in much of Mongolia is measured in animals,” said Nicole Davi, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and at William Paterson University. “If you lose all of your animals, you lose everything.”

Ayush Ish, 69, has lived in the Gobi Desert all her life. She and her husband lost their flock of goats and sheep in the 2002 dzud and drought, then slowly rebuilt it with the help of 50 animals allocated by the government. But when the 2010 dzud struck, all but 20 died. Around the same time, her husband died as well.

“I don’t know if it will happen again,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “I can only hope that we’re entering a good period now.”

Like many rural Mongolians who follow a shamanistic belief system, Ms. Ish says that mining — which has recently become widespread around the country — is to blame for the changing weather patterns. Troy Sternberg, a geographer at the University of Oxford, said that “under the Mongolian belief system, the earth and sky are connected, so if you take gold out of the ground, you’re disrupting the natural rhythms of weather and climate.”

Whether or not that is true, the rise of mining — along with overgrazing by herders chasing the cashmere market — has led to wide desertification. Some studies indicate that 70 percent of Mongolia’s grasslands are degraded.

Taken together, these patterns bode ominously for the herders’ way of life. A team of Mongolian and international experts warned in a 2009 report that such trends “may lead to the end of the Mongolian traditional way of animal husbandry as we know it, that at onetime was the very core of the entire nomadic civilization.”

Some herders have already reached that breaking point. After the 1999 to 2002 dzuds alone, 180,000 people moved to the capital, Ulan Bator, in search of a better life. “The movement from a rural, agrarian life to an urban industrial one is not necessarily a bad thing if people are interested in doing other things that are tied to a more diverse economy,” said Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, an ecologist at Colorado State University. “But opportunities and services have to exist to enable that.”

Those who reach the capital usually settle in the ger district, a sprawling, makeshift neighborhood that encircles the city and creeps into the surrounding valleys. Although the skyscrapers of downtown are in eyesight, basic services are luxuries. Families must trek up to a mile to collect water from communal wells, and in winter, they burn coal and garbage to keep warm, helping to make Ulan Bator one of the world’s most polluted cities.

Khishigee Shuurai, 36, moved from western Mongolia to the capital around 15 years ago. In 2002, after losing their flock, her parents joined her in the city. Then her father died of a heart attack. Before that, she said, he frequently expressed a longing to return to the countryside.

For many, however, life here is preferable to the uncertainty and harshness of nomadic herding. Ms. Shuurai, a school custodian and mother of four, does not share her father’s regrets.

She and her husband, a construction worker, have jobs, and they recently got electricity in their ger. Her 7-year-old daughter was honored as the top student in her class, and her 12-year-old son wants to become an engineer.

“There’s many reasons to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to go back.”
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Nuwer, Rachel. 2014. “It’s Not Genghis Khan’s Mongolia”. New York Times. Posted: September 22, 2014. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/its-not-genghis-khans-mongolia.html?_r=0

Last desert nomads defy a raging sandstorm

Image: Michele Palazzi, Gone with the Dust #02, 2012)

The future of these children is as unclear as the stormy landscape they're playing in. Captured in the Gobi desert in Ömnögovi province in the south of Mongolia, the children are from one of the last families still to follow an ancient nomadic lifestyle.

Titled Gone with the Dust #02, this photograph has won Michele Palazzi this year's Environmental Photographer of the Year Award. He received his £5000 prize yesterday at a ceremony at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Palazzi took the winning photograph during a sandstorm on his second day with the family last year: they agreed to let him live with them for awhile if he helped them look after their herd of camels. When the storm blew up, Palazzi says, the adults ran out of the tent to gather the camels, but the children took the chance to play in the wind.

The photographer travelled to Mongolia to document the nomadic culture that is disappearing in the face of the country's rapid modernisation. In particular, the activities of foreign mining companies are threatening the nomads' way of life, for example by using up water they need to survive. The biggest business is coal mining, and dust from these mines covers pasture, making it hard to graze camels and horses. Making matters worse, a huge copper and gold mine is soon to open too. Many nomads have little choice but to move elsewhere or go to work in the mines themselves.

An exhibition with a collection of the environmental, natural and social-themed photographs from the competition will be on display at the Royal Geographical Society until 3 May. It then moves to Grizedale Forest Visitor Centre in Cumbria, UK, from 25 May to 1 September, before going on show at the premises of the award's sponsors, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management in London.
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References:

Sekar, Sandhya. 2013. “Last desert nomads defy a raging sandstorm”. New Scientist. Posted: April 10, 2013. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2013/04/gobi-desert-nomads-sandstorm.html

"Lost" Great Wall of China Segment Found?

Google Earth, carbon dating suggest wall network even bigger than thought.

A forgotten section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered deep in the Gobi Desert—and outside of China—researchers say.

With the help of Google Earth, an international expedition documented the ancient wall for roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) in a restricted border zone in southern Mongolia in August 2011.

The defensive barrier formed part of the Great Wall system built by successive Chinese dynasties to repel Mongol invaders from the north, according to findings published in the March issue of the Chinese edition of National Geographic magazine. (The National Geographic Society is responsible for both the magazine and National Geographic News.)

Preserved to a height of 9 feet (2.75 meters) in places, the desert discovery belongs to a sequence of remnant walls in Mongolia collectively known as the Wall of Genghis Khan, said expedition leader and Great Wall researcher William Lindesay.

Named after the founder of the Mongol Empire, the Wall of Genghis Khan usually survives only as "a faint trace," Lindesay said in an email.

But "we found a 'real wall', standing high and existing as a dominant landscape feature," he said.

What's more, it wasn't the work of Genghis Khan or his heirs but actually a long-lost segment of the Great Wall of China network, the team's findings suggest.

First to Investigate New Great Wall?

Close to China in the border region of Ömnögovi Province, the ancient structure hadn't been scientifically explored or studied before, said Lindesay, director of the International Friends of the Great Wall conservation group, based in Beijing, China.

"We're the first to investigate the ruins," he said.

"According to the army officers who minded us, we were the first outsiders to be allowed into the area," Lindesay added. "We assumed various local Mongolians had been to the area, but had not considered the structure of much interest."

At times seeking out topographic clues seen in Google Earth—the wall is visible on satellite images—the team located two well preserved but contrasting stretches of wall.

One section had been made mainly with wet mud and a woody desert shrub called saxaul, the other from blocks of black volcanic rock.

Along its vast length, Lindesay suspects, the wall originally stood at least 2 meters (6.5 feet) taller than it does today.

"What we found was just the last remaining piece of a 'fossil'—the skull or the large thighbone, with the rest missing," he said.

"One can expect the wall was both much higher and continuous for vast distances."

That dark basaltic rock seems to have been an obvious choice for the second stretch, which crosses the rugged remains of extinct volcanoes.

The clean, straight edges to the blocks indicate that the stone was quarried, which would have required a large, organized workforce and an efficient transport system, the team said.

Rewriting History

Ancient Mongolian texts suggest that the so-called Wall of Genghis Khan was built as an animal fence by Khan's son Ögedei to keep wild gazelle on his land.

But the recently explored Gobi Desert wall segment isn't in a region where large herds of gazelle occur.

"There would be no reason to build an animal wall in the Gobi," said anthropologist and Mongolia historian Jack Weatherford, formerly of Macalester College, Minnesota.

Chinese researchers, perhaps not surprisingly, have speculated that China's Han dynasty had erected these little-studied stretches in about 115 B.C.

But radiocarbon dating of partly exposed wood and rope remains extracted from the wall indicates that the saxaul-segment construction went on for more than a hundred years—and occurred about a thousand years later than thought, from A.D. 1040 to 1160.

Those dates hint that the Western Xia dynasty built the walls—or at least rebuilt old Han walls on the sites.

Holding Back the Mongol Tide

This northwestern Chinese dynasty isn't known to have contributed to the Great Wall system, but in at least one aspect, a Western Xia origin makes sense.

During the Western Xia period, Mongol tribes were rising in strength and making forays south, Lindesay noted.

"If one imagines the wall as a platform, with some kind of battlement—perhaps of wooden stakes, functioning as a shield to those manning its top—then it would have been an effective defense installation," he said.

But, mysteriously, the expedition team found no pottery, no trash, no coins, no weapons—nothing to prove the wall was ever actually manned. Nor did they find any of the watchtowers that mark surviving sections of the Great Wall within China.

"The wall system was incomplete," Lindesay said. "It not only lacked the signaling capability [to make smoke signals]—it didn't appear to be capable of accommodating troops."

Unfinished Business

"I believe the wall here is only half built and that there was, for some reason, a rethink on locating the wall here," Lindesay said.

It isn't difficult to imagine how the purported Great Wall segment's harsh desert location might have led to the remote frontier defense being abandoned, he added.

Weatherford, the Minnesota-based anthropologist, agrees with Lindesay's conclusion that the newfound remains were Chinese constructions.

There's a good reason, Weatherford added, that the stretch nevertheless carries Genghis Khan's name.

Mongolians, he said, are sensitive to the idea of "Chinese structures built on their land, since it carries the possible claim that the land was once Chinese.

"By calling it the Genghis Khan Wall, the name makes the place Mongolian and rejects foreign influence," Weatherford said.

He also describes the expedition new findings as "very important, because to my knowledge this wall has not been studied."

"I would risk saying that it is the largest human-made structure or artifact in all of Mongolia," he added. "It is amazing to me that it is not already much better analyzed."

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References:

Owen, James. 2012. ""Lost" Great Wall of China Segment Found?". National Geographic News. Posted: March 19, 2012. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120319-great-wall-of-china-mongolia-science-lindesay/

Ancient Mongolian Tomb Holds Skeleton of Western Man

Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they speak in a whispered double helix.

Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia, near China's northern border. DNA extracted from this man's bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia's Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues.

On the basis of previous excavations and descriptions in ancient Chinese texts, researchers suspect that the Xiongnu Empire -- which ruled a vast territory in and around Mongolia from 209 B.C. to A.D. 93 -- included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu Empire once ruled the major trading route known as the Asian Silk Road, opening it to both Western and Chinese influences.

Researchers have yet to pin down the language spoken by Xiongnu rulers and political elites, says archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. But the new genetic evidence shows that the 2,000-year-old man "was multi-ethnic, like the Xiongnu polity itself," Anthony remarks.

This long-dead individual possessed a set of genetic mutations on his Y chromosome, which is inherited from paternal ancestors, that commonly appears today among male speakers of Indo-European languages in eastern Europe, central Asia and northern India, Kim's team reports in an upcoming American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The same man displayed a pattern of mitochondrial DNA mutations, inherited from maternal ancestors, characteristic of speakers of modern Indo-European languages in central Asia, the researchers say.

"We don't know if this 60- to 70-year-old man reached Mongolia on his own or if his family had already lived there for many generations," says study co-author Charles Brenner, a DNA analyst based in Oakland, Calif.

Two other skeletons from the Xiongnu cemetery in Duurlig Nars show genetic links to people who live in northeastern Asia, according to Kim's team. Other team members include Kijeong Kim of Chung-Ang University, Eregzen Gelegdorj of the National Museum of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar and Eun-Jeong Chang of the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.

The Duurlig Nars man's genetic signature supports the idea that Indo-European migrations to northeastern Asia started before 2,000 years ago. This notion is plausible, but not confirmed, says geneticist Peter Underhill of Stanford University. Further investigations of Y chromosome mutation frequencies in modern populations will allow for a more precise tracing of the Duurlig Nars man's geographic roots, Underhill predicts.

Scholars have long sought to trace the origin and spread of related languages now found in Europe, India and other parts of Asia. One hypothesis holds that Indo-European languages proliferated via several waves of expansion and conquest by nomads known as Kurgans who had domesticated horses and thus could travel long distances. In this scenario, Kurgans left a homeland north of the Black Sea, in what's now Russia, around 6,400 years ago.

Another view holds that farmers from ancient Turkey spread Indo-European tongues as they swallowed up one parcel of land after another, beginning around 9,000 years ago.

Since 1978, discoveries of 2,400- to 4,000-year-old mummified corpses with European features in northwestern China, not far from Mongolia, have fueled the Kurgan hypothesis (SN: 2/25/95, p. 120). Remains of large wheels found with these blond-haired individuals raise the controversial possibility that these foreigners introduced carts and chariots to the Chinese.

Add to those discoveries a report in the September 2009 Human Genetics. Geneticist Christine Keyser of the University of Strasbourg in France and her colleagues found that nine of 26 skeletons previously excavated at 11 Kurgan sites in northeastern Russia possess a Y chromosome mutation pattern thought to mark the eastward expansion of early Indo-Europeans. That same genetic signature characterizes the Duurlig Nars man.

By 2,000 years ago, the easternmost Indo-European languages were probably spoken in northwestern China, Anthony holds. So an Indo-European speaker could have aligned himself with Xiongnu political big shots and earned an eternal resting place in an elite Xiongnu cemetery, in his opinion.

Kim agrees. The Duurlig Nars man's tomb lies close to the tomb of an especially high-ranking Xiongnu man whom he may have served in some way, he suggests.

Kim's group plans to extract and study DNA from additional Duurlig Nars skeletons. For now, Anthony remarks, "this new study from Mongolia is important because it adds one more point of light to a largely dark prehistoric sky."

It seems that Europeans living in China is not uncommon. Refer to this post from August 12, 2009 is about a collection of distinctly Caucasian mummies.
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References:

Bower, Bruce. 2010. "Ancient Mongolian Tomb Holds Skeleton of Western Man". Discovery News. Posted: February 3, 2010. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/mongolian-tomb-western-skeleton.html