Scotland’s Stone Age graves reveal ‘web of descent’ between male relatives

Stone Age people in northern Scotland buried related men, rather than women, together in the same graves, creating a “web of descent” at several Neolithic sites, new DNA research has revealed.

In the study, published in the journal Antiquity on Tuesday (April 14), researchers analyzed DNA from 22 people taken from five graves in Caithness County, northern Scotland, and the Orkney Islands. These tombs were used between 3800 and 3200 BC, when prehistoric Scotland was transitioning from foraging to farming.

But the human bones in these Stone Age tombs were scattered, mixed, and degraded over almost 6,000 years, meaning archaeologists learned little about social relations in Neolithic Scotland.

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Using ancient DNA analysis, researchers can now ask and answer questions about kinship in this era. For example, “How often were graves used to house the remains of close genetic relatives? How often were individuals selected for inclusion because they were related along the male line?” study co-author Chris Fowler, an archaeologist at the University of Newcastle in the UK, said in a statement.

Inside the grave, researchers discovered close genetic relatives, all of whom were linked along the male line. Two of the tombs contained father-son pairs, and one contained a brother. A pair of half-brothers, or paternal uncle and nephew, were discovered in two adjacent graves. And one of the graves at Loch Calder in north-east Scotland contained the only evidence of a father, son and grandson being buried together in Neolithic Scotland.

“It’s incredible to think that more than 5,000 years after these people were placed in these tombs, we can now reconstruct how they were related through analysis of ancient DNA,” study lead author Vicki Cummings, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in Wales, said in a statement. “This study shows that the people who built these monuments placed particular importance on the male line.”

No close relationship was found in the skeletons of the women the researchers studied. For example, there are no mother-daughter or sister pairs in the tomb, and the closest genetic relationship between two women is a fifth-degree relative, equivalent to first cousins.

However, the two women buried in the Orkney graves were genetically related to the men buried in the mainland graves, suggesting that women may have played an important role in maintaining a “web of lineage” across the oceans, the researchers wrote in the study.

Experts have long believed that the region’s Neolithic people organized along male lines, and new research confirms that belief.

“These results are consistent with the interpretation that paternal lineage has been traced in this area,” Cummings said. “For the people who brought the Neolithic to Britain, this social bond may have been as important as the pot, the ox, or the axe.”

Stone Age Quiz: What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods?