The nasty end of the oldest nuclear family - November 18, 2008
A 4600-year-old mass grave in Germany contains the oldest proven ‘nuclear family’, say genetic researchers.
Discovered in 2005, the graves near Eulau contained a number of adults and children who appeared to have met a violent end. Wolfgang Haak, who now works at the The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and colleagues analysed the genetic make-up of these individuals.
“A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family,” they write in PNAS (link live soon). “...Their unity in death suggests a unity in life.”
The New York Times notes that the fact all the individuals appeared to have died at the same time was a hint that they met a sudden end. There’s also the fractured skulls and an arrowhead in one of their spines. The Times says Haak suggests that:
Adolescents and young adults were either not present — perhaps they were working in fields — or were able to escape, while younger children and older adults were killed. But then the survivors returned and, with intimate knowledge of the relationships among the dead, properly buried them.
He told the BBC, “You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it’s a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. Normally you should be careful in archaeological research not to allow feelings in that make us base judgements on modern ideas, we don’t know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love.”
More from this week’s PNAS
“A hydrologic and economic analysis of the Upper Rio Grande basin in the Southwest, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that subsidies and other policies that encourage conservation methods like drip irrigation can actually increase water consumption,” says the NY Times.
“Two popular leukemia drugs, Gleevec and Sutent, kept lab mice from developing type 1 diabetes and put 80 percent of diabetic mice in remission, an international team said on Monday,” says Reuters.
Photo courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (2008).
