2023-08-31 16:45:24
The diversity of family systems in prehistoric societies has always fascinated anthropologists and the general public. A new study now provides revealing data on how a family group whose members lived some 3,800 years ago on the Russian steppe was structured.
An international team made up of, among others, Jens Blöcher and Joachim Burger, both from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, has analyzed the genomes of skeletons of a family clan found in the Nepluyevsky necropolis. This necropolis dates from the Bronze Age and is located in a point of the Russian steppe that is located on the border between Europe and Asia.
Using statistical genomics, it has now been possible to decipher the biological and marriage links between those deceased buried in the necropolis.
In the set of tombs investigated, rested six brothers, their wives, children and grandchildren. The older brother had eight children and two wives, one of whom came from the East Asian steppe area. The other siblings did not show signs of polygamy and probably lived monogamously with fewer children.
“The burial site offers a fascinating snapshot of a prehistoric family,” emphasizes Blöcher. “It is remarkable that the firstborn brother apparently had a higher status and therefore greater chances of reproduction. The right of the male firstborn seems familiar to us; we know it, for example, in the Old Testament, but also in the aristocracy of historical Europe”.
One of the investigated skeletons. (Photo: © Svetlana Sharapova. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Genomic data reveals even more. Most of the women buried in that set of graves were immigrants. The sisters of the buried brothers, in turn, found new homes elsewhere.
As Burger makes clear, female marital mobility is a common pattern that makes economic, biological, and patriarchal sense. While the men remain in the same place where they were born, thus ensuring the continuity of the family line in the area and the conservation of land and other property, the women move to other communities marrying men from such places, thus avoiding the problem of consanguinity.
The authors of the study have also discovered that the genomic diversity of women in the set of tombs analyzed was greater than that of men. Therefore, the women who married into the family came from a wider area and were not related to each other. Now settled in their new place of residence, when they died they were buried in their husbands’ family mausoleum.
The study is titled “Descent, marriage, and residence practices of a 3,800-year-old pastoral community in Central Eurasia”. And it has been published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (Source: NCYT by Amazings)
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