DNA extracted from the bones of a skeleton in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in western Mongolia identifies him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians or north Indians. That he was buried with honor also shows that he assumed “a prominent position in ancient Mongolia”s Xiongnu Empire,” said 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 had already suspected 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 Silk Road, opening the major trading route to both Western and Chinese influences. “Researchers have yet to pin down the language spoken by Xiongnu rulers and political elites,” said archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. But the new genetic evidence shows that the 2,000-year-old man “was multi-ethnic, like the Xiongnu polity itself,” Anthony remarked.

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, according to Kim”s team. He also displayed a pattern of mitochondrial DNA mutations, inherited from maternal ancestors, characteristic of speakers of modern Indo-European languages in central Asia. “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,” said study coauthor Charles Brenner, a DNA analyst based in Oakland, California. Two other skeletons from the Xiongnu cemetery in Duurlig Nars show genetic links to people who live in northeastern Asia, according to Mr. Kim”s team.

The Duurlig Nars man”s genetic signature supports the idea that Indo-European migration to northeastern Asia started before 2,000 years ago.