By Sharin Hussain via SWNS
Stone Age tribes deliberately avoided interbreeding by having unrelated families living together, a new study reveals.
Scientists found that several distinct families living together was a deliberate system.
The team at Uppsala University in Sweden, examined several well-known French Stone Age Burial sites,
Professor Mattias Jakobsson said: “This gives a new picture of the last Stone Age hunter-gatherer populations in Western Europe.
“Our study provides a unique opportunity to analyze these groups and their social dynamics.”
The study, published in the journal PNAS, was conducted by obtaining biomolecular data from human skeletons buried at places like Hoedic in Brittany.
The remains were dated, around 6,700 years ago, to the very last stages of the Mesolithic, the Old Stone Age.
This was when the last Western European hunter-gatherers lived, overlapping with the Neolithic, New Stone Age, when settled farmers took over.
Around 7,500 years ago, the last hunter-gatherer populations in Western Europe encountered incoming New Stone Age farmers and were gradually replaced and assimilated.
Earlier studies have suggested that the last hunter-gatherer communities deliberately assimilated women from the neolithic farming community.
This new study shows that the hunter-gatherer groups mixed with other hunter-gatherer groups but not with the neolithic farmers.
Luciana Simões, researcher at Uppsala University, said: “Our genomic analyses show that although these groups were made up of few individuals, they were generally not closely related.
“Furthermore, there were no signs of inbreeding.
“However, we know that there were distinct social units – with different dietary habits – and a pattern of groups emerged that was probably part of a strategy to avoid inbreeding.”
The burials at Téviec and Hoedic in southern Brittany, France, contained graves of many individuals buried together, which was unusual at Mesolithic sites.
This was assumed to mean that the individuals were biologically related.
Dr. Amélie Vialet from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, concluded: “Our results show that in many cases – even in the case of women and children in the same grave – the individuals were not related.
“This suggests that there were strong social bonds that had nothing to do with biological kinship and that these relationships remained important even after death.”
