Megalithic tombs in western and northern Neolithic Europe were linked to a kindred society

Abstract

Paleogenomic and archaeological studies show that Neolithic lifeways spread from the Fertile Crescent into Europe around 9000 BCE, reaching northwestern Europe by 4000 BCE. Starting around 4500 BCE, a new phenomenon of constructing megalithic monuments, particularly for funerary practices, emerged along the Atlantic façade. While it has been suggested that the emergence of megaliths was associated with the territories of farming communities, the origin and social structure of the groups that erected them has remained largely unknown. We generated genome sequence data from human remains, corresponding to 24 individuals from five megalithic burial sites, encompassing the widespread tradition of megalithic construction in northern and western Europe, and analyzed our results in relation to the existing European paleogenomic data. The various individuals buried in megaliths show genetic affinities with local farming groups within their different chronological contexts. Individuals buried in megaliths display (past) admixture with local hunter-gatherers, similar to that seen in other Neolithic individuals in Europe. In relation to the tomb populations, we find significantly more males than females buried in the megaliths of the British Isles. The genetic data show close kin relationships among the individuals buried within the megaliths, and for the Irish megaliths, we found a kin relation between individuals buried in different megaliths. We also see paternal continuity through time, including the same Y-chromosome haplotypes reoccurring. These observations suggest that the investigated funerary monuments were associated with patrilineal kindred groups. Our genomic investigation provides insight into the people associated with this long-standing megalith funerary tradition, including their social dynamics.

Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

“…In these multiple burials, only a few female individuals (four individuals) were buried together with one of their parents or their sons, compared with a higher number (21 individuals) of males buried with their father, brothers or sons, indicating that males likely tended to stay where they were born, while females were likely mobile. This pattern is observed both before and after the arrival of the YAM-related ancestry and is indicative of patrilocal societies during Late Neolithic times in the studied region, consistent with previous results from Neolithic times throughout Northern and Western Europe 25,26 .…”

“…The social and family structures, as reconstructed by biological kinship networks, remain the same before and after the arrival of steppe-related ancestry in the region. The predominant social structure in populations buried at the sites investigated in this study must have been a patrilocal society where males stayed where they were born, and females came from more distant living families, a societal dynamic which has been confirmed by stable isotopes 29 and that has been previously documented for the Middle Neolithic 25 . Also, higher female mobility has been shown during the Early Bronze Age 26,30 .…”

AuthentiCT: a model of ancient DNA damage to estimate the proportion of present-day DNA contamination

“…Some methods involve ligation of adapters to double-stranded DNA ("double-stranded libraries", [46]) while other methods convert the two DNA strands into separate library molecules ("single-stranded libraries", [47]). Here, we focus on the damage patterns in single-stranded libraries, as they fully preserve the strand orientation of the sequenced DNA fragments and are widely used in aDNA studies [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56].…”

Kinship Determination in Archeological Contexts Through DNA Analysis

“…First-degree (parent-offspring, full siblings) and second-degree (half-siblings, grandparent-grandchild, aunt/uncle-niece/nephew) kinship relations between individuals buried in the same as well as in different megaliths were identified and an association of these monuments with patrilineal kindred group were found. These data provided important information on the social dynamics of the megalithic culture (Sanchez-Quinto et al, 2019). The analysis of a Late Neolithic mass grave from Poland, associated with the Globular Amphora Culture, demonstrated that the 15 buried individuals belonged to the same extended family.…”