(ORDO NEWS) — The study provides new insight into marriages in the Aegean Bronze Age and provides the first Mycenaean biological family tree.
In Bronze Age Greece and Crete, marrying your cousin was commonplace, new research shows.
This “unprecedented” discovery is the first time researchers have been able to look behind the curtain on ancient marriages in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece using genetic material from human bones.
In addition, the researchers were able to map the biological family tree of the Mycenaean family for the first time.
By analyzing the genomes of 102 people who lived from the Neolithic to the Iron Age in Crete, mainland Greece and the Aegean Islands, the researchers were able to do something that no one had previously been able to do.
In places like Greece, the climate makes DNA conservation a challenge.
But thanks to recent advances in creating and evaluating ancient genetic data, it is now possible to overcome this, meaning the team has been able to build the first genetic Mycenaean family tree.
Using bones found in a late Bronze Age infant tomb, they were able to determine the relationship of seven infants, six of whom were children and grandchildren of the same couple.
The seventh child may have been a cousin of one of them. It may be a relatively small family tree, but it is the first of its kind to be genetically reconstructed for the entire ancient Mediterranean region.
One of the other, more shocking findings in the article was that ancient people in Crete, other Greek islands, and the mainland frequently intermarried with their cousins.
Of all the inhabitants of the Aegean studied, about 30 percent had genetic markers indicating that they were descendants of two related people.
The authors of the study write that the discovery is “unprecedented” and “reveals a cultural practice not supported by archaeological evidence.”
“More than a thousand ancient genomes from different regions of the world have now been published, but it seems that such a strict system of consanguineous marriages did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world,” Eirini Skourtanioti, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“It came as a complete surprise to all of us and raises a lot of questions.”
Perhaps the most burning of these questions in the minds of many people is: why were people so eager to keep relationships in the family?
The team doesn’t have a definitive answer, but they offer a few suggestions.
“Geographical isolation, endemic pathogenic stress, the integrity of the inherited land” are all factors that may have historically made inbreeding alliances more favorable, the authors write.
In this case, in their opinion, agriculture could play a role:
“Maybe it was a way to prevent more and more division of inherited agricultural land?
In any case, it guaranteed a certain continuity of the family in one place, which is an important condition for growing olives and wine, for example,” suggested Philipp Stockhammer, one of the lead authors. research.
“There is no doubt that the analysis of ancient genomes will continue to provide us with fantastic, new information about ancient family structures,” Skurtanioti added.
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