Bronze Age burials suggest women moved to live with their husband’s clans, but also helped structure societies
Bronze Age people buried men and women in pairs beneath the floors and inside the walls of the hilltop fortress of La Almoloya, near modern-day Murcia, Spain.The burial jar, found under the floor of a mountaintop citadel called La Almoloya in southeastern Spain, held a puzzle. Almost 1 meter in diameter, the vessel entombed a woman in her late 20s with a shining silver diadem on her forehead.
The results from La Almoloya, published last year, are part of a surge of new studies that are shifting the focus of ancient DNA research from genetic links between populations toward intimate, interpersonal connections. As the cost of DNA sequencing has plummeted, researchers have started to sequence genomes from many people at a site, revealing the structure of ancient communities.
Today, sequencing can be done at a fraction of what it cost a decade ago, and often yields more information per sample. Researchers can analyze well-preserved DNA from an ear bone for as little as a few hundred dollars—about the same price as getting a radiocarbon date. Based on shared stretches of DNA, studies can identify siblings and link grandparents to grandchildren, tracing the chronology of a cemetery in a way traditional radiocarbon dating, accurate to several decades at most, cannot.
Others caution that a handful of studies from a 5000-year period across Europe isn’t enough to show patrilocality was a rule. “We’re still looking at single-site studies that don’t allow us to draw strong conclusions,” says Wolfgang Haak, a geneticist at EVA. As ancient DNA databases grow exponentially, Ringbauer hopes access to tens of thousands of published genomes will create a sort of 23andMe for the distant past, linking prehistoric people to one another across time and space. “We can now screen tens of thousands of ancient individuals for IBD,” Ringbauer says. “My vision is you’d add a study and immediately see, ‘Oh, there’s a second cousin over there.
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