Kristina Killgrove is an archaeologist with specialties in ancient human skeletons and science communication. Her academic research has appeared in numerous scientific journals, while her news stories and essays have been published in venues such as Forbes, Mental Floss and Smithsonian.
Hundreds of skeletons found in cemeteries on the Great Hungarian Plain reveal clues about nine generations of Avars, a mysterious warrior culture that dates back nearly 1,500 years. A new analysis of the remains suggests that men stayed put while women married into the culture and that it was common for people to have multiple partners.
The Avars left no written history, and their language is preserved only as occasional words in contemporaneous Latin and Greek texts. But half a dozen previous research studies in the past decade have attempted to determine the origins of the Avar people through their DNA, ultimately finding considerable genetic influences from European, Eurasian and Northeast Asian populations.
"This suggests that Avar women left their homes to join their husbands' communities, which might have provided some social cohesion between distinct patrilineal clans," Lara Cassidy, a research assistant in the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying News & Views article published in Nature.
"All the aforementioned phenomena lead us to assume that the segment of Avar society we investigated had a structure comparable to that of Eurasian pastoralist steppe people," particularly in terms of patrilineality or male-reckoned descent, the researchers wrote in their study.
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