One of the oldest family trees ever reconstructed

December 28, 2021

A 6,000-year-old tomb unearthed in England holds the remains of 27 family members, representing a five-generation lineage descended from one man and four women, researchers have found using DNA analysis.

The findings suggest there were polygamous marriages in the upper echelons of Neolithic society at that time, because the researchers think it was unlikely that the ancestral man had four wives one after another; instead, he probably had more than one wife at the same time.

The analysis reconstructs one of the oldest family trees ever charted, said Iñigo Olalde, one of the lead authors of the study said. The results showed that the men were usually buried near their fathers and their brothers.

This finding suggested that descent was patrilineal — in other words, later generations buried at the tomb were connected to the earliest generation through their male relatives.

In the same tomb, he also identified the remains of three women and five men who had no genetic relationship to the family. It's possible that the women were married to men buried in the tomb and had either no children or only adult daughters who were then buried somewhere else.

"This study is important because it's the first large family tree that we get from prehistory," he said.