By Paul Rincon
The science editor is on the website.
The image is courtesy of the Corinium Museum.
The image caption is.
An artist's reconstruction of a monument.
The world's oldest family tree was compiled from human bones found in a 5,700-year-old tomb in the UK.
Five generations of one extended family were found in the tomb's inhabitants.
The four women who all had children with the same man were descended from most of the people found in the tomb.
The right to use the site was determined by the descent of one man.
The people were buried in different parts of the tomb because they were descended from the same matriarch.
This suggests that the first- generation women held a significant place in the community. There are two L-shaped chambers in the Neolithic tomb at Hazleton North in Gloucestershire.
Two of the women and their children are in the south chamber, and their kids are up to the fifth generation.
The collapse of the north passage meant that it wasn't possible to bury there anymore, so the other two women and their kids are mostly in the north chamber.
The lead archaeologist in the study, Dr Chris Fowler, said that the architectural layout of other Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated.
The image caption is.
There is a family tree for burials in Hazleton North.
Farming was introduced to Britain by people whose ancestors had spread into Europe from Turkey several thousand years earlier. The work will help researchers understand Stone Age people and their culture.
Prof Reich hopes this will be the first of many such studies. It makes vivid the lives of the people who lived here a long time ago.
The researchers say there are indications that stepsons were adopted into the family, and that the original founder's mother had children with a male related to the original founder.
Two female family members who died in childhood were buried in the tomb, but the complete absence of adult daughters suggests that their remains were placed in the tombs of male partners with whom they had children, or elsewhere.
There are women who are missing. Because men and women are born at the same rate, the question is where they are. Prof Reich said that it's not that they're in the next tomb over, but that the whole community is missing them.
Are people dead? There are some cremation practices. Is it possible that people are disposed of in different ways in the landscape, or that they are only seen in a certain way?
The caption is media.
Prof David Reich is building the world's oldest family tree.
The tomb shows evidence of polygyny, with men having children with multiple women, and also shows that women had children with multiple men.
Women who had children with one man tended to be different from each other. In cases where women procreated with more than one man, the men tended to be close relatives.
The University of the Basque Country's Iigo Olalde was the lead geneticist for the study and he said that the preservation of the tomb and the use of the latest technologies allowed them to uncover.
The study was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
