An excavation into a 5,700-year-old tomb in Hazleton North, Gloucestershire, UK, has unearthed bones that have been genetically mapped to reveal the kinship relations between those buried there. They are almost all descended from one man who had children with four women. These five parents and their offspring are joined by three more generations of their descendants. It's quite a feat to get a DNA analysis from so many different individuals who died so long ago, and the data on their relationships gives us some intriguing clues into their culture.
The tomb is organized into sections headed by each of the four women of the first generation, whose descendants are buried in the same section. There are some individuals who were not related to the single first-generation male, but were the child of one of the four first-generation women. One of the more curious finds is that no adult daughters are found in the tomb. That might indicate that daughters were eventually buried with their husbands' families elsewhere, or they may have been cremated. Read the fascinating findings of the family tree constructed thousands of years after the fact at BBC News. -via Damn Interesting
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