A Tang official’s tombstone might tell you where his family came from, what his father did, and how he rose through government. In a study of 3,640 Tang tomb epitaphs, examination success became an increasingly strong predictor of an elite man’s career as the dynasty went on. Old aristocratic pedigree mattered less; a father’s position still mattered. The epitaphs capture a shift in routes to office.
The epitaphs raise a question about biology. If institutions that rewarded scholarship endured for centuries, and if those rewards affected who left descendants, could ancient DNA carry any trace of the change?
The earlier article on this question found an intriguing upward shift in a genetic score around dates marking major Confucian institutional milestones. But was that pattern robust—or partly an artifact of the original data and dating choices? Here I rerun the test with more ancient individuals, a revised genetic score, corrected sample dates, and an independent check based on an East Asian genetic study. Then I apply the very same milestone dates to ancient Europeans as a placebo test. The result tells us considerably more about how seriously the original finding should be taken.
