New study on frozen mummies unearths habits of Mongol Empire elites

According to earlier studies, milk has been a valuable resource in Mongolia for over 5,000 years. It has been challenging to pinpoint when people first started consuming milk from yaks, despite the fact that the intake of milk from cattle, sheep, goats, and even horses can be reliably dated. Only seldom discovered yak remains and artistic representations of yaks have been used to determine when and where people tamed this creature. It's unclear, though, if these are domestic or wild.

"Our most important finding was an elite woman buried with a birchbark hat called a bogtog and silk robes depicting a golden five-clawed dragon. Our proteomic analyses concluded that she drank yak milk during her lifetime," said Alicia Ventresca-Miller, U-M assistant professor of anthropology. "This helped us verify the long-term use of this iconic animal in the region and its ties to elite rulers."

Taboo or 'khorig'

The area, called Khorig, means taboo, and it is situated along a high-elevation ridgeline that is shrouded in mist. Given that the researchers found evidence of connections to the ruling elite, such as a five-clawed dragon painted on a Cizhou vessel and a customary robe or deel, it may be assumed that this cemetery was regarded as elite.

"Ceramic vessels were turned into lanterns made of dairy products, which revealed long-standing religious ideas and the daily life of the elites of the Mongol empire," said J. Bayarsaikhan, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the National Museum of Mongolia.

Proteomic analysis of tooth calculus was utilized by an international team of academics to determine the elites' diets during the Mongol Empire. They discovered proteins linked to the consumption of various people's blood, milk, and other tissues.

"What is really exciting is that between cows and yaks, there is only a single difference in the amino acid sequence in the most commonly recovered milk protein, and in this case, we were able to recover the part which is specific to yak, Bos mutus," said study co-lead and palaeoproteomics specialist Shevan Wilkin of the University of Zurich and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.