2024-04-26 20:03:08
Wednesday (April 24) in a study published in the journal Nature an international group of scientists conducted a DNA analysis of 424 skeletons found in four Avar cemeteries in present-day Hungary. Based on these results, the team identified 298 people who were closely biologically related and compiled genealogical trees spanning nearly three centuries.
Avars settled in the Carpathian basin from the 6th century. middle The political core of this group was the kagan, a political leader surrounded by elite horse-riding warriors and their families. Originally nomads, in the 7th century At the beginning, the Avars established permanent settlements and buried their dead in large cemeteries, sometimes in ornate graves with weapons, jewelry and horses. Although the Avars controlled a large area from roughly present-day Hungary to Bulgaria, their rule ended around 800 AD when they were attacked by Charlemagne and his army.
The Avars left no written history, and samples of their language survive only as isolated words in modern Latin and Greek texts. But over the past decade, half a dozen scientific studies have attempted to trace the origins of the Avars through their DNA — ultimately finding a strong genetic influence from European, Eurasian, and Northeast Asian populations.
In the new study, a team of researchers used software to calculate genetic relatedness based on DNA results. They found that most of the people were related to other inhabitants of the same burial ground – and that the women had more diverse origins than the men, suggesting that women from other cultures married Avar men. Specifically, the women’s parents were not found in the burials, and the men were descended from the men who created the family tree. Those related by blood relatives were almost always buried together.
“This suggests that Avar women left their homes and joined their future husbands’ communities, which may have provided some social cohesion between different male clans,” in an accompanying article published in the journal Nature Lara Cassidy, a research assistant in the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in the study, says News & Views.
Genetic analysis revealed that both men and women were more likely to have children with more than one partner. She also provided clear evidence of the so-called levirate, where closely related men father children with the same woman, often after the death of one of the men. The team found three father-son pairs, two pairs of brothers, an uncle and a nephew – who had relationships with a common partner.
“All the above-mentioned phenomena allow us to assume that the structure of the segment of the Avar society that we studied was similar to the structure of Eurasian steppe shepherds” – especially in terms of male kinship, the researchers write in the study.
While researching specific families, the team of scientists also found that in the large cemetery of Rákóczifalva in the 7th century. in the second half, genetics, food resources, and grave types changed—suggesting that political changes occurred as one genetic line took over from another.
“This community change reflects not only the archaeological and dietary changes we found in the area itself, but also the large-scale archaeological changes that took place throughout the Carpathian Basin,” says study co-author Zsófia Rácz, an archaeologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
Finally, the study’s large-scale analysis of ancient DNA shed light on the intricacies of Avar kinship relationships and showed that “the society retained a detailed memory of its ancestors and knew who its biological relatives were from generation to generation,” says one of the lead authors, Max Planck of Evolutionary Anthropology Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, archaeogeneticist of the Institute in Leipzig (Germany).
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2024-04-26 20:03:08