Dhe first-born son had a high social status, women who had married in had moved there and thus ensured genetic diversity: these are two findings that the Mainz researchers at the Examination of the genetic makeup of an extended family have won who lived 3800 years ago. The paleoanthropologists around Jens Blocher and Joachim Burger have examined a burial site in the southern Ural region with archaeologists from Frankfurt and Yekaterinburg. Six brothers and their wives, children and grandchildren were buried there.
Genetic material was analyzed from 32 people, 80 percent of whom were blood relatives. The presumably eldest brother had eight children with two wives, one of whom came from the East Asian steppes. The other brothers probably lived monogamously and had significantly fewer children. Blocher assumes that the firstborn had a higher social status and therefore better chances of reproduction: “We know this right of the male firstborn, for example, from the Old Testament, but also from historical times in Europe.”
According to Burger, the fact that the brothers had married women from abroad also corresponds to a well-known pattern: “While one sex remains local and ensures the continuity of the tribal line and the possessions, the other sex marries in from outside to prevent marriages between relatives and incest.”
In the Bronze Age, people lived in the south of the Urals as shepherds who could work with metal but did little agriculture. Their life must have been hard because the researchers describe the health of the extended family as very poor. Bloche estimates the average life expectancy for women at 28 years and for men at 36 years. The last dead to be buried in the burial mound were infants and young children. Possibly, the anthropologists say, the family was decimated by disease and the survivors moved away.
#3800yearold #genetic #material #large #family #examined