In a Stone Age cemetery, DNA reveals a treasured 'founding father' and a legacy of prosperity for his sons

• Our new results, published today in Nature, show a group of prehistoric farmers who lived within a network of other communities.
• This group even brought with them the bones of a “founding father”, establishing a lasting, male-dominated lineage.

Difficulties looking into the past

• Ancient burials can tell us a lot about how prehistoric people treated their dead.
• But figuring out how these societies behaved on a day-to-day basis has always been challenging for researchers.
• These challenges are due to a lack of written records, and physical data that can be hard to interpret.
• But only a few, much smaller burials have been found that would likely represent the everyday people of the region.

A network of communities

• Using specialised ancient DNA techniques and several sources of evidence from the burials, we reconstructed two of the largest ever family trees from a prehistoric cemetery.
• Interestingly, some of the “new incoming” female individuals were distantly related to each other, meaning they may have come from a network of nearby communities, and even from the same communities.
• Lastly, we also observed the adult daughters from Gurgy were not buried at the site, meaning they had likely left Gurgy to join other nearby communities themselves (once they had reached a certain age).

A founding father

• We observed an entire group, made up of several generations (children, parents and grandparents), arrived at Gurgy together from the beginning.
• This group must have left a previous site, leaving behind any previously deceased children (but yet still brought and reburied the founding father).
• Hence, like the founding group, these last generations abruptly departed Gurgy together, leaving behind their own buried children.