Scientists uncover family life of Stone Age people with DNA

Scientists have used DNA testing to uncover the earliest evidence that Stone Age man lived in nuclear families.

An international team of researchers, including experts from the University of Bristol in England, dated remains from four burial sites discovered in Germany in 2005.

The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other, which was an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.

One of the graves contained a female, a male and two children.

Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group were a mother, father and their two sons aged around eight or nine and four or five years old.

They say this is the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world.

The burials, discovered and excavated at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, were also unusual for the way in which they were buried.

The remains of 13 individuals were found in total and all had been interned simultaneously.

Several pairs of individuals were buried face-to-face with arms and hands interlinked and all the burials contained children ranging from new-borns up to 10 years of age and adults of around 30 years or older.

Many showed injuries that indicated they were the victims of a violent raid.

One female had a stone projectile point embedded in one of her vertebra and another had skull fractures.

Several bodies also had defence injuries to the forearms and hands.

The researchers used state-of-the-art genetics and isotope techniques to reconstruct along with physical anthropology and archaeology.

In an article published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lead author Dr Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide said: “By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe – to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far.

“Their unity in death suggests a unity in life.

“However, this does not establish the elemental family to be a universal model or the most ancient institution of human communities.”

As well as establishing the biological relationships of the people buried at Eulau, the researchers were also able to shed light on their social organisation using strontium isotope analysis.

Hylke de Jong, a PhD student at the University of Bristol, said: “We measured strontium isotopes in their teeth to give us an indication of where these people spent their childhood.

“Strontium from the food you eat is incorporated into your teeth as they grow.

“We can relate the proportion of different strontium isotopes back to regions with different geology and identify the area where a person grew up.”

This revealed that females spent their childhoods in a different region from the males and children in the group.

Dr Alistair Pike, Head of Archaeology at the University of Bristol and co-Director of the project, said this is an indication that marrying out of society and that the women were expected to move to where the men were.

“Such traditions would have been important to avoid inbreeding and to forge kinship networks with other communities,” he said.

The remains are now on permanent display in the Landesmuseum Sachsen-Anhalt in Germany.