In a Stone Age cemetery, DNA reveals a treasured 'founding father' and a legacy of prosperity for his sons
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Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Our new results, published today in Nature, show a group of prehistoric farmers who lived within a network of other communities.
Key Points:
- 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.