Roaming Ancestry – Landscapes of social and genetic relations in prehistory

Introduction

Kinship systems and networks of contact and exchange in prehistoric societies could so far only be studied indirectly. Recent advances in archaeogenetics have enabled the retrieval of ancient genomic data with high success rates, which often allows the study of nearly all individuals from the same archaeological site, making intra-site studies become reality.

Biological Relatedness

Estimating degrees of biological relatedness and demonstrating biological unrelatedness can form a robust scaffold to reconstruct social and kin relations. This permits stable inferences on kinship structures and social organization in prehistoric societies.

Analytical Advances

Further analytical advances that estimate shared identity-by-descent between individuals can identify biological relatives up to the 10th degree. This has enabled the detection of distant relatives between different sites.

Connections Across Sites

Many such connections across sites and regions can be found in the published ancient human genomes from Europe’s prehistory. The chances to find more scales up quadratically with the number of individuals studied.

Integration of Data

Through full integration of archaeological, anthropological, isotopic, and other context data, it will for the first time be possible to match levels of resolution in archaeology and genetics. This will allow us to map relationships over geographic distances and to learn how prehistoric communities were organized, interacted, and formed networks.

Project Goals

Given these exciting prospects, this project will enhance the data density in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe by including new well-contextualized sites and regions at our disposal. The aim is to build comprehensive maps of contact, trade, and exchange based on quantifiable and statistically robust measures.

Unique Dataset

This unique, large-scale, spatio-temporal reference dataset will allow us to use innovative integrated modeling approaches that explore theoretical frameworks and kinship models from ethnographic studies. This will lead to the production of novel insights into the evolution and structures of human societies.