2023-07-26 19:43:39
Updated Wednesday, July 26, 2023 – 19:43
The study published by Nature focuses on individuals that existed more than 6,000 years ago and reveals their family ties, their diet, and their social structure.
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Ancient DNA is capable of revealing hitherto secret aspects of our ancestors and tracing the family tree of a Neolithic community in France, which had generally stable health and nutritional conditions and a supportive social network.
The Neolithic lifestyle, based on agriculture, arose in the Near East about 12,000 years ago and contributed to the modern way of life, as the ability to produce and store additional food led them to develop new social customs based on wealth and to form social hierarchies.
A study by French and German scientists published today in Nature analyzed DNA at the Gurgy Les Nosats site (northern France), from 94 individuals, dated approximately between 4,850 and 4,500 BC, which allowed to reconstruct two family trees.
The first connects 64 individuals over seven generations and is the largest reconstructed lineage. from ancient DNA to date, while the second connects twelve individuals over five generations.
The exploration of the lineages revealed a strong patrilineal pattern, in which each generation is linked almost exclusively to the previous one through the biological father, which connects the entire Gurgy group through the paternal line.
The combined evidence for mitochondrial lineages and stable strontium isotopes that revealed anon-local origin of most women suggested the practice of patrilocality, meaning that children stayed where they were born and had children with women outside of Gurgy.
Settling in the male partner’s community of origin is known as virilocality. On the contrary, most of the adult daughters of the lineage are missingin line with female exogamy, which could indicate a reciprocal exchange system.
The “new entrants” women were only very distantly related to each other, meaning they must have come from a network of close communities, rather than a single close group, according to the Max Planck Institute (Germany), one of the signatories. of the study.
The “founding father” of the cemetery
The analysis of family trees indicates the existence of a large number of full siblings and that they had reached reproductive age, explained the first author of the research, said Mat Rivollat, from the University of Ghent (Germany).
“Combined with the expected equal number of women and the significant number of stillborn babies, this indicates large family sizes, a high fertility rate, and generally stable health and nutritional conditionswhich is quite surprising for such an ancient time,” he pointed out.
Another notably unique feature of Gurgy is the lack of half-siblings, which suggests neither polygamous nor monogamous serial reproductive associations (or the exclusion of the offspring of these unions from the main cemetery), compared to the so far only other example of Neolithic megalithic union practices.
Within this patrilocal system, a male individual from whom all members of the larger family tree descended could be identified as the “founding father” of the cemetery.
Her burial is unique to the site, as her remains were interred as a secondary repository within the grave of a woman, from whom no genomic data could be obtained.
The researchers believe that his bones must have been brought there from the place where he died to be reburied in Gurgy.
“He must have been a very important person to the founders of the Gurgy site. to be taken there after primary burial elsewhere,” explained Marie-France Deguilloux of the University of Bordeaux, co-lead author of the study.
Although the main lineage spans seven generations, the demographic profile suggests that a large family group spanning multiple generations arrived at the site. Other data suggest that the group must have left an earlier site and some three or four generations later, about a century, they moved to another place.
These findings could provide the basis for further archaeogenetic studies to gaining a general perspective on social organization potentially diverse from Neolithic societies in Europe.
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