Researchers have found that the remains of 27 family members were found in a 6,000-year-old tomb in England and represent a five-generation line.
The researchers think that the ancestral man probably had more than one wife at the same time, because they think he probably had four wives in a row.
Iigo Olalde, a population geneticist at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and one of the lead authors of a study published in the journal Nature, said that the analysis reconstructed one of the oldest family trees ever mapped.
Scientists from Harvard University in Massachusetts, the University of Vienna in Austria, and the University of the United Kingdom were involved in the research.
He said that the new techniques are likely to be applied to other collections of ancient human DNA.
He said that the study is important because it is the first large family tree that we get from prehistory. We will probably get many more in the next few months or a year.
The Neolithic bones were found.
The remains of 35 people were excavated from the Hazleton North barrow in the Cotswold Hills in the 1980s and were the subject of the study.
The barrow, or burial mound, was in a farmer's field where hundreds of years of plowing had threatened to destroy it completely, so archaeologists excavated to preserve what was left.
A few years ago, a different team of researchers took genetic material from the bones and teeth of the entombed remains, and worked with it to piece together how the individuals were related.
It became clear that the interrelationships were very complex. He said that when this became apparent, he thought "Oh my God." It was fun to find this family.
The family tree has 5 generations. The University ofNewcastle.
The interrelationships of 27 of the 35 bodies, including two young girls, could be pinned down by the analysis.
The men were usually buried near their fathers and brothers. The researchers said that the later generations buried at the tomb were connected to the earliest generation through their male relatives.
The tomb was divided into two chambers, one in the north and the other in the south, with the descendants of two of the women being buried in the northern chamber.
It was found that these first- generation women were socially significant in their community and that their status was recognized when the tomb was built.
Family matters.
Four men buried in the tomb were identified as "stepsons" because their mothers were part of the line. He said that the stepsons could have been adopted into the family when their mothers joined it, although it was also possible that the women bore children from men outside the family who were not recognized as their partners.
Two of the daughters of the lineage who had died in childhood were buried in the tomb, but no adult daughters of the lineage were buried there.
The remains of three women and five men were found in the same tomb. It's possible that the women were married to men who were buried in the tomb, and that they had no children or adult daughters who were buried somewhere else.
The significance of the five unrelated men is not known, but they may have been adopted into the family or connected through relationships that can't be determined genetically. He said that it was likely that the ancestors of the people buried there had come to Britain from continental Europe as part of an immigrant wave of Neolithic farmers.
The relationships between those buried in the Hazleton North tomb are likely to be older than those found on the European continent.
There are related content.
Stone balls were found in a Neolithic tomb.
The bones of Neolithic immigrants were found in a Spanish cave.
The largest Neolithic settlement in Israel was uncovered.
The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
