Analysis of hundreds of burials in Hungary traces longest known family tree—and absent daughters
Researchers found long family trees sprang from influential founders, like this Avar man buried next to a horse in the seventh century C.E. in Hungary.In 568 C.E., according to contemporary records, warlike horse riders from the Mongolian steppes called the Avars surged into the grassy plains flanking the Danube River, in roughly the territory of modern Hungary. Together with other groups from Central Asia, they formed a new power center in Europe, forcing the Byzantine Empire to pay tribute.
The whole-cemetery approach made it possible to reconstruct entire family trees, some containing dozens of individuals. The nine-generation tree stretched from a founding male buried not long after the Avars first arrived to a descendant buried 250 years later. The community approach “made these people really come to life for me,” says co-author Zsófia Rácz, an archaeologist at Eötvös Loránd University who excavated one of the sites.
Dozens of Avar people buried at the Rákóczifalva site in Hungary, which was excavated in the early 2000s, were biologically related to each other.That pattern matches a practice ethnographers call patrilocality, in which men stay put while women leave their birthplaces to find mates,, among others. The DNA also revealed polygamy and “levirate unions,” in which closely related males—brothers, or a father and son—had children with the same woman.
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