CNN
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If you want to stick to your land in the Bronze Age GreeceYou could do worse than marrying your cousin.
A team of international researchers is analyzing it genome Ancient human remains have shown that, unlike other European societies of the period, first cousins in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece often married each other.
experts from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, with an international team of partners, analyzed more than 100 genomes of Bronze Age people from the Aegean.
The team behind the study, published Monday in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology and Evolutionsays their findings provide “exciting insights” into the social order of the Aegean Bronze Age.
By analyzing the DNA of people buried in a tomb under the courtyard of a house in a Mycenaean hamlet on the Greek mainland, researchers managed to reconstruct the family tree of its inhabitants from the 16th century BC.
Archaeologist Professor Philipp Stockhammer, one of the study’s lead authors, told CNN: “We wanted to take a look at how genetically related people were buried together and you can see the relevance of genetic relatedness to the structure of society.” What can be learned about
“We managed to make the first family genealogy for the Mediterranean. We can see who lived together in this house by looking at who was buried in the courtyard outside.
“We can see, for example, that three sons lived in this house as adults. One of the marriage partners brought his sister and a child. It was a very complex group of people living together. Is.
Even more surprising was the fact that about half of the people living on the islands married their cousins, while on the mainland the proportion was about a third.
“It’s not 100%, but not everyone’s cousin,” Stockhammer said.
“People have studied the genomes of thousands of ancestors and there is hardly any evidence for societies in the past of cousin marriages. From a historical point of view it is really outstanding,” he said.
Stockhammer and his colleagues believe that such unions were down to economics, to prevent family lands from being divided.
He explained: “All the driving force is to unite the land within the family. If you look at what people were growing, it was grapes and also olives for olive oil, but both grapes and olives needed to be in a certain place for decades.
“If you marry into your family it means you focus on staying in the same area.”
He noted that, in contrast, in other parts of Bronze Age Europe, women often traveled hundreds of miles to marry. He explained that resources would have been more plentiful in those areas.
“In Greece, there is not much space to grow things and the things you grow need to grow for decades,” he said.
“We can absolutely see cousin-to-cousin marriage from genomic evidence. There’s a lot of people doing it to say it’s pure chance – but it’s not 100%. I would say it’s a fairly strict practice.” Was.
“It’s an unwritten rule because everyone has done it.”
Stockhammer explained the significance of the discovery, saying: “With this knowledge we are forced to fundamentally rethink the social organizations and societies in this period that were behind these wonderful works of art and architecture.
“This is a society where we have written records about palace administration but now we are able to say something about ordinary people.”