18 April 2020 | New Scientist | 15ANCIENT remains found in the
Mongolian steppe suggest that
the story of the female warrior
Mulan may have been inspired
by real Xianbei women who
rode horseback and probably
also used bows and arrows.
According to folklore, a
powerful East Asian ruler
demanded every family send
one man to swell the ranks of his
army, and a girl named Mulan
faced a difficult choice: either
let her weak father go to war,
or take his place. Now it seems
there may be truth to this age-
old Ballad of Mulan.
Christine Lee and Yahaira
Gonzalez at California State
University examined skeletons
from 29 ancient burials across
Mongolia. The burials belonged
to three groups of nomadic
people: the Xiongnu, who began
to occupy the region about
2200 years ago, the Xianbei,
who took over around 1850 years
ago, and the Turkic people, who
displaced the Xianbei roughly
1470 years ago.
Three of the skeletons
belonged to Xianbei women –
and two were potentiallywarriors. Lee and Gonzalez
reached this conclusion partly
due to the nature of marks left
on the bones where muscles
once attached. The marks are
larger if the muscle was heavily
used, and the pattern of marks
on both women’s skeletons
suggests they had routinelyworked the muscles someone
on horseback would use. There
were also indications that they
practised archery.
Lee was surprised by the
discovery. “The number of
women allowed to participate
in these activities must have
been really small,” she says,
adding that Mongolian history
suggests that it was rare for
women to do either.
Markings on three other
skeletons indicate that Xiongnu
women may also have engaged
in archery and horseback riding
to a limited degree. Another
three skeletons indicate thatTurkic women apparently didn’t
practise archery, although they
seem to have spent a limited
amount of time riding horses.
There may be a simple reason
why some Xianbei women
may have become warriors:
the political landscape was
particularly unstable when they
were alive. After the Han dynasty
in China ended in AD 220, there
was intermittent violence across
the region for centuries.
“Perhaps everybody was
needed to defend the country,”
says Lee, who was due to present
this work at a meeting of the
American Association of
Physical Anthropologists
that was cancelled.
The finding is particularly
significant because Mulan is
often thought to represent a
Xianbei woman. There are hints
of this in her story, says Lee. For
instance, nomadic men aged 15
to 55 were considered of military
age and might be called on to
fight in the army – but in China
there was no tradition of
sending one man from each
family to serve, she says.
And although in this year’s
cinematic retelling of the story
Mulan joins the Imperial
Chinese army to fight against
nomadic people from the
Eurasian steppe, in the original
tale she may have joined a
Xianbei army’s fight against
different invaders, says Lee.
Female warriors may also
have existed elsewhere on the
Eurasian steppe over the past
few millennia. Lee says recent
excavations in Siberia and
Kazakhstan have uncovered
evidence of women buried
with swords and chariots. ❚DURING the recent, unprecedented
bush fires in Australia, a single blaze
in Cudlee Creek, a small town near
Adelaide in South Australia, burned
more than 25,000 hectares of land
and destroyed numerous homes
and vehicles.
One of the largely unnoticed
victims of this fire was clover glycine
(Glycine latrobeana), a rare herb in
the pea family that is endemic to
South Australia and was listed as
vulnerable even before the blaze.
While the amount of the herb lost
in Cudlee Creek and elsewhere in
the region is still being assessed,
an international effort has already
swung into action to help restore it,
highlighting the importance of the
world’s network of seed banks.
Twelve years ago, around
1200 clover glycine seeds were
sent to the UK to be dried and
cooled to -20°C for storage at
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s
Millennium Seed Bank in West
Sussex. Now, 250 of them have
been withdrawn and sent to the
South Australian Seed Conservation
Centre in Adelaide to help restore
what was lost.
“It really does just show seed
banks work. They’ve provided that
insurance policy. Some people think
of them as static places, and this
shows when a species is in crisis,
you can provide seeds to provide
restoration,” says Elinor Breman
at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Clover glycine is found in shady
woodland gullies of manna gum
(Eucalyptus viminalis), a type of
tree favoured by koalas. Much of
this habitat has already been lost
because vegetation has been
cleared for farming.
Breman says that although the
plant has no intrinsic or medicinal
value, it is beautiful and should be
restored as it is already threatened
and has a very small range, meaning
it faces a greater risk of being lost in
incidents such as the bush fires. ❚The 2009 film Mulan:
Rise of a Warrior picked
up the ancient legendPlants ArchaeologyAdam Vaughan Colin BarrasCOLL
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MEDIAGROUPMulan legend may be
based on ancient warriors
Rare herb caught in
Australian bush fires
saved by seed bank
“ Patterns of marks on
the women’s skeletons
suggest they rode horses
and practised archery”