World's Oldest Family Tree Created Using DNA (bbc.com) 49
Scientists have compiled the world's oldest family tree from human bones interred at a 5,700-year-old tomb in the Cotswolds, UK. The BBC reports: Analysis of DNA from the tomb's occupants revealed the people buried there were from five continuous generations of one extended family. Most of those found in the tomb were descended from four women who all had children with the same man. The right to use the site was based on descent from one man. But people were buried in different parts of the tomb based on the first-generation matriarch they were descended from. This suggests that the first-generation women held a socially significant place in the memories of this community. The Neolithic tomb, or "cairn," at Hazleton North in Gloucestershire has two L-shaped chambers, one facing north and the other south.
Co-author Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, who led the generation of ancient DNA from the remains, explained: "Two of the women, all of their children are in the south chamber - and their kids up to the fifth generation. "And then the other two women, their kids are primarily in the north chamber - although some of them switch to the south chamber later in the use life of the tomb - probably reflecting the collapse of the north passage which meant it wasn't possible to bury there anymore." Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, UK, the first author and lead archaeologist in the study, said: "This is of wider importance because it suggests that the architectural layout of other Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated at those tombs."
The tomb dates to an important period just after farming was introduced to Britain by people whose ancestors had - several thousand years earlier - spread through Europe from Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Aegean. The work will help researchers understand family dynamics among these Stone Age people and learn more about their culture. There are also indications that "stepsons" were adopted into the family, the researchers say - males whose mother was buried in the tomb but not their biological father, and whose mother had also had children with a male related to the original founder. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Co-author Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, who led the generation of ancient DNA from the remains, explained: "Two of the women, all of their children are in the south chamber - and their kids up to the fifth generation. "And then the other two women, their kids are primarily in the north chamber - although some of them switch to the south chamber later in the use life of the tomb - probably reflecting the collapse of the north passage which meant it wasn't possible to bury there anymore." Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, UK, the first author and lead archaeologist in the study, said: "This is of wider importance because it suggests that the architectural layout of other Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated at those tombs."
The tomb dates to an important period just after farming was introduced to Britain by people whose ancestors had - several thousand years earlier - spread through Europe from Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Aegean. The work will help researchers understand family dynamics among these Stone Age people and learn more about their culture. There are also indications that "stepsons" were adopted into the family, the researchers say - males whose mother was buried in the tomb but not their biological father, and whose mother had also had children with a male related to the original founder. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Relation to modern populations? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Now I've got to read it.
Re:Relation to modern populations? (Score:4, Informative)
Only the matrilineal mitochondrial DNA was listed in the Nature article. The haplogroups are listed below. haplogroup.org is the primary source of location. If they didn't list one, then I use Wikipedia. If that also doesn't list it, I've given the peak levels listed by FamilyTreeDNA.
(H originated in northern Spain)
H1 - Basques, Iberian Peninsula, North Africans
H5 - Western Caucasus
J1c1 - Basques, Denmark, Italy
J1c1b1 - Basques, Denmark, Italy
J2b1a - Scandinavia, Germany
(K1a is most common in Belgium and Armenia, so spread out from there)
K1a3a1 - Ireland, England, France
K1a4 - Germany
K1b1a - England, France, Ireland
K1b1a1 - England, Ireland
K1b1a1d - England, Ireland, Scotland
K1d - Unsure but it looks Scandinavian
K2b1 - Germany
N1b1b - Near East, possibly linked to Ashkenazi Jews
T2e1 - Sephardic Jews
U3a1 - Atlantic coast of Europe
U5a2d - Germany, England
U5b1+16189 - Saami, Finland, Estonia
U8b1b - I can only find one reference to a person in Greece
V - Saami, Cantabrian people
W5 - Belgium
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad I'd already decided to print the paper. I'll incorporate that into my marginalia. Me sniff rocks, not genomes.
Re:Relation to modern populations? (Score:4, Informative)
This being Gloucestershire, where are you going to get "representative" "local" samples? Multiple populations have moved in, out and through in the last century (I've got relatives who live there, but who descent includes Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Sussex coast). Plus, the costs of dealing with genetic data from living people (or relatives of living people) include a lot of data security and privacy questions, which nobody wants the paperwork for. So ... maybe you'd want to sample unidentifiable bodies from (say) an 18th century graveyard that has been uprooted and relocated in it's entirety (say, because of a government road project). And if that's not available ... well, how much do you value the answer to this question? How much are you willing to pay for the study?
This population is post the "Neolithic Revolution" with the introduction of agriculture, cattle livestock, and (IIRC) the "Beaker" pottery style and around 50% of the population being replaced by "continental" genotypes over a century or so. That's about 10-13% change per generation, which would be maybe one family in a hamlet each generation. Fairly rapid, but not the Conan-esque image of someone coming in, chopping half the throats and replacing them with your own boyos. (For a start, you'd have to have a huge "baggage train" of "camp followers" to supply your settlers - always a problem for armies on foot, living off the land.)
There was another substantial influx of "continentals" with the Romans. And another 20-30% replacement of "locals" with "Germans" (actually, most likely Frisians, from North Holland) in the "Dark Ages" - not quite Vikings wildly rapining and pillaging, but a fair amount of settlement happening.
This isn't really my area - oilfield trash, me - but there is a lot known about the area already. Probably a more interesting question might be "how do the haplotypes of this family lineage (lineages, potentially - they consider a second if less parsimonious tree in the extended data) compare with family lineages from a few hundred years before?" ... except, as far as we can tell, the people before this "Neolithic Revolution" buried people differently.
In respect of that question, the distribution of male versus female skeletons is interesting. There is a definite paucity of female bodies. Particularly adult (-ish) daughters of the buried males and females are significantly absent. That strongly suggests female exogamy - the daughters moved a fair distance from home to marry, and didn't come back - along with a different funerary practice for females compared to the male lineage - such as cremation followed by dispersed scattering of the bones. Or, since some of the skeletons showed evidence of animal gnawing, exposure to the elements of the body, then men's bodies going into the cairn and women's bodies going into ... somewhere else.
With dubious historical accuracy, "Western" movies often depict "Indian" burial grounds composed of elevated platforms on which the bodies are laid out and then scavenged by wildlife until ... well, that never gets shown in the movies - costs too much in effects, I guess. But is that necessarily a less respectful treatment of bodies than putting them in a hole in an artificial mound? It's different, but all that means is it is different from our habit of treating men, women, and children the same in death. Why do we do that?
Sorry, I'm drifting from the point, and if I want to print that PDF, I need to bugger off to the library, sharpish.
If you want a copy of the PDF, contact me through my journal page and I'll get it to you somehow.
Re: (Score:3)
In respect of that question, the distribution of male versus female skeletons is interesting. There is a definite paucity of female bodies. Particularly adult (-ish) daughters of the buried males and females are significantly absent. That strongly suggests female exogamy - the daughters moved a fair distance from home to marry, and didn't come back - along with a different funerary practice for females compared to the male lineage - such as cremation followed by dispersed scattering of the bones. Or, since some of the skeletons showed evidence of animal gnawing, exposure to the elements of the body, then men's bodies going into the cairn and women's bodies going into ... somewhere else.
I would think that distance isn't really necessary. In a typical patriarchal society, married daughters would be considered to have left the family and joined another, so would not go into the family tomb, but would be buried with their husbands family. Of course, if this is five generations, I would expect a fair number of cousins marrying cousins, etc. It would not be particularly shocking thousands of years ago (or frankly even today in much of the world) so that would mean some daughters of one branch b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Definitely seems quite a bit lower than, for example, Regency era England based on Jane Austen's novels.
Re: (Score:2)
Mind you ... the way Satan talks about JA in Andy Hamilton's documentaries [bbc.co.uk] ... ohhh, her biographers have done a good cover-up job on her. Such language! "ASBO Austen [wikipedia.org]" they call her in the 7th circle. When she's out of earshot.
Re: (Score:2)
So... dolphins are evil?
Re: (Score:2)
Another of those little things that somehow seem not to make it into the national press very often is that several of the famous dolphins around the world which star in news reports as "loving to swim with snorkellers" ... are overwhelmingly male. And several of them get erections and rub their dicks against humans in rubber suits. Some - not all - are known to particularly like swimming with women who are menstruating.
Odd how that doesn't make it into the "lovely dolphin"
Re: (Score:2)
What ? (Score:1)
The Mormon religion is at least 5800 years old ?
and last time I checked a "cairn" was a pile of rocks.
Re: (Score:2)
Baby momma predates "wife" by millenia.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Surprising though it may seem but some things weren't invented in America. In fact, monogamy is probably a relatively new institution - before the early Roaman Republican period (say 300BCE), I can't think of any society that considered it a desirable thing. At least, for rulers and people rich enough to get into the written record. In the Judeo-Xtian-Muslim religion, patriarch Abraham fathered children off both Hagar and Sarah ; Solomon had 300 wives and 700
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me that the Egyptian pyramids and other pyramids could rightfully be called cairns. In more modern times, Prince Albert's Cairn is also quite clearly a pyramid.
Re: (Score:2)
It gets more acute in places like Orkney, where the local stone
Re: (Score:2)
Getting to the Pyramids though, almost all of the stone has been significantly dressed to achieve a cuboid shape before being stacked, and the final casing stones have been very closely fitted. That's definitely building.
That's why I mentioned the Balmoral cairns and specifically Prince Albert's Cairn. With some of those cairns it's a bit hard to tell if they just used found stone or if they used some processed and some found, etc. The one for Prince Albert is definitely not just found stone though.
The Egyptian pyramids seem to be all processed stone. I've visited the Teotihuacan though and climbed the pyramid of the Sun and the Moon and those look like mostly rough stone with some processed stone in places (apparently the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't recognise "Prince Albert's Cairn" as meaning specifically the one above Balmoral. Never been there, but I've seen it well enough (binoculars) to have it filed under "Rubislaw granite". There's a significant degree of variation in the colour of the Caledonoid granites of the Neuk, and if I'm right in that assessment, then it came from about 55 miles E in what would then have ben the outskirts of Aberdeen, along the Aberdeen- Banchory- Ballater branch line (important for the logistics). These days it (Rubislaw quarry) is about 2km from the inner edge of the Green Belt, and there is an outer range of dormitory towns (my French course has just been tearing "une banlieu" to pieces), including Kemnay, whose quarry produces a fine "pink" granite, and was active at the same time as Prince Albert and Rubislaw. Literally, you can tell them apart at 3 km with a good pair of binos and 100m with the Mark-1 eyeball.
That's pretty neat. I always wanted to have that kind of skill when I was a kid. Never really got there though. I have my own skills, but not that one. My father is pretty good at identifying rock types, but his specialty for that sort of thing has always been more the regional geography. Show him a photo of a landscape and he's pretty talented at telling you where in the world the picture was taken.
Last I heard there was a plan to build a 2-level nightclub in Rubislaw with the party level being on a barge floating on the flooded quarry, and the access and parking 80-odd m above amongst the oil company offices - I don't know how that is going with the slump and COVID and everything.
Are they planning an elevator to take people up and down? I'm just picturing a bunch of drunk people stumblin
Re: (Score:2)
It just takes a little bit of classroom and a thousand hours in the labs and in the field. After the first few hundred specimens, you start getting systematic about it.
My father has the rather alarming habit of identifying different species of grasses
Re: (Score:2)
Postulating a feature for which there is no evidence. Hmmm. I don't think you'd get away with that in an undergraduate essay question. "Defend your proposition" as sarcastic bastard and Head of Department "Nige" Trewin would have said.
Doesn't really stop people from coming up with umpteen billion ideas on how ancient people could have built this or that and postulating all sorts of devices that could have been used by them. This is definitely idle speculation on my part, of course. It just seems to me that there will always be details missing from our reconstructions.
Many (most? all?) RSCs have been excavated with varying degrees of rigour over the last 2-3 centuries. About 1/3 to 1/2 have some form of cist burial (sometimes single person, sometimes multiple) near the centre, but enough evidence was retained at the time of excavation that we know that was on the order of a millennium after the organic matter which was found in the bottom of the "sockets" into which the stones were lowered. Some had other pits in the enclosed area, but also considerably after the construction. A small proportion (~1/10?) had a "pavement" of white rocks (most often "vein quartz", sometimes metasedimentary quartzite, which wasn't that common in the region) either centrally placed, or around the "recumbent". BUT, I can't think of any reports of postholes in the appropriate area. You're not the first person to think that, and people have looked for evidence of such structures ... and if any has been found, I haven't heard of it. (But, this is a hobby for me - if there is such evidence that I haven't heard of, I'd only be mildly surprised. But it's very likely to be quite new evidence.)
Lack of postholes might eliminate a long-term structure. The priest at the alter might have just stood on a stool instead. Like you've observed, we don't really know enough
Re: (Score:2)
Or it just wasn't an altar, in our meaning of the word.
One of the more popular interpretations was that the large "recumbent" stone functioned as a sound reflector, helping the sound (of whatever) project across the area enclosed by the "circle". That attracts a moderate amount of armchair work using acoustics prediction software (an architectural thing, I guess), or field work with a calibrated speaker and microphone ... well it's not an inh
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That seems rather higher than I'd expect. I'd have to dig out and read the actual paper(s) to check what was said, rather than what was reported.
The increase in (social) differentiation between members of an agricultural society compared to a hunter-gatherer society is fairly well established - at least for modern groups. From crunching the
Re: (Score:2)
Cairn is also used as a type of tomb. There were heaped cairns with chambers inside, and ring cairns where the graves were covered over by a pile of rocks. In this case, it was a large chambered cairn.
Re: (Score:2)
Whatever they were thinking as they built these, they were not thinking like us. Which is fine, because they're not "us".
Re: (Score:2)
It suggests a complete lack of any concept of scaffolding and minimal understanding of self-supporting structures since they're using the chalk to hold everything up.
Chalk would also prevent water from seeping through any gaps in the drystone walling and potentially provide a nice surface for art (although I don't know of any examples of art in cairns). Plaster dates back to around 7,000 BCE, could chalk tunnels have been a precursor? Or a convenient alternative?
You're right they weren't thinking like us.
Th
Re: (Score:2)
They were building in a completely different way.
Where we have evidence of how the people of the area and time built their housing (postholes, hearth pits & linings, middens, rain gutter trenches), we know that they built their homes essentially from poles lashed together (i.e. scaffolding), with further poles laid on the structure to form a base for thatch or turf (or, in very small huts, possibly leather). They understood scaffolding at least
"stepsons"? (Score:3)
Four men descended from non-lineage fathers and mothers who also reproduced with lineage male individuals, suggesting that some men adopted the children of their reproductive partners by other men into their patriline
Or perhaps Daddy didn't know. It's not like they could just go out and get a paternity test.
Re: (Score:2)
That was exactly my thought.
Like "how cute they think that's the only way".
Re: (Score:2)
It's politically unacceptable to mention the fact that women can and will cuckold men.
It's not. The archaeologists who study this stuff are, in fact, adults who live in the real world. That raises the question of what world you live in and what exactly is wrong with you?
Re: (Score:2)
OK, I'll bite. Please cite sources. This should be good, LOL!
_You_ will bite? _I_ have to cite sources? You're the one who made the wacky claims! You wrote:
It's politically unacceptable to mention the fact that women can and will cuckold men.
Do you have some citation for this? Where is this policy published?
Also, you wrote:
research grants these days have explicit SJW rhetoric written into them. You literally won't qualify if you don't advance the goals of Critical Social Justice.
So, once again, where can I find these policies?
In any case, despite the fact that you owe citations, not me, how about: Richard III [nature.com]
You know that paternity testing upon birth was outlawed in Germany for precisely this reason, right? Prenatal as well. Shipping test kits into the country is illegal.
It looks like the prenatal testing ban is mostly an anti-abortion measure. Can't say I agree with that as it's not sound health policy. There are exceptions though, so I suppose it depends on what th
Re: (Score:2)
The wacky claim yours - that these SJW policies don't exist. These claims are so widely known as to not require citation. They get reported about all the time. It's like asking if the sun comes up in the east. What is it with you SJWs and your denials of reality that you created? You live inside a censored bubble, don't you?
Ah, you mean widely reported in over the top nutbar circles, like Fox News opinion shows, OAN, Infowars, etc. "Widely reported" inside some particular bubble doesn't mean widely reported in the real world. I get it, I get it, only your true saviors tell "THE TRUTH". Of course, if any of your saviors decide to say, "I quit, I'm so tired of telling lies" you will cease believing them and fall back into the comfort of your bubble. It's why so many cults end up in mass suicides. The cult leader can manipulate t
Re: (Score:2)
You seriously don't see anything wrong with applying hard left SJW political litmus tests in our education system? Really? Do you even know the tragic history of this practice and how it played out when it was done on a large scale? People starved to death.
I'm very clearly saying that your claim that it's happening is some far-right fever dream. I'm not sure what the point of pretending I'm saying something different is. I know that's how you people "debate", but who exactly are you trying to virtue signal to here?
This is name-calling, not an argument. And you think you're on the good guys side? If you had an argument, you would have used it. You don't have one, so you use insults instead. Standard practice.
Misogynist is a description. One that you seem to fit. If someone illicitly lights things on fire, it's not name-calling to call them an arsonist. If someone robs people, it's not name calling to call them a thief. Now, I'm not absolutely saying tha
Re: (Score:3)
From the low degree of interrelatedness, regardless of what the penises and their attached brains thought, the people who got pregnant were very non-random in who they got pregnant by, and avoided getting pregnant by two too-closely-related men.
Maybe "You and I have had a fight. Let's make up by swapping wives until both are pregnant, then raising each other's children." It might sound odd to us, but as a way of preventing fe
Paleo (Score:2)