Located about nine miles from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, Hazleton North is a Neolithic long cairn – a kind of chambered tomb that is found across much of southern Britain. This particular example, built c.3700 BC, has two opposed L-shaped chambered areas (‘North’ and ‘South’), each with their own separate entrance, passageway, and chamber, and when the tomb was excavated (by Alan Saville, between 1979 and 1982) these chambered areas were found to contain the well-preserved remains of at least 41 men, women, and children.
Now ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis of 74 samples, mostly taken from teeth and petrous bones (a dense part of the base of the skull, near the ear), has produced genome-wide data for 35 of these people, revealing thought-provoking insights into how this community may have understood kinship, and how this might have influenced the organisation of the tomb. This study involved archaeologists from the Universities of Newcastle, York, Exeter, and Central Lancashire, and geneticists from the Universities of the Basque Country, Vienna, and Harvard. Their findings, recently published in Nature (see ‘Further information’), have reconstructed a five-generation family tree containing 27 individuals – three times more people than the largest pedigrees previously traced using aDNA.
Strikingly, the vast majority of males in this family tree are descended from a single founding male (known as NC1m) and four women that he reproduced with (SC1f, NC2f, NC3f, and U3f). It is not clear whether these partnerships reflect a polygamous society or successive relatively short monogamous relationships, but it appears that patrilineal descent was the key factor in determining whether a person was buried at Hazleton North. In all, the 15 parent-to-child links connecting the third through fifth generations of the family to the first two went through males, and there were many more males than females present – 26 out of the 35 individuals studied.
Seasons and the city