Genetic study suggests a Stone Age strategy for avoiding inbreeding
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Blood relations and kinship were not all-important for the way hunter-gatherer communities lived during the Stone Age in Western Europe. A new genetic study, conducted at several well-known French Stone Age burial sites, shows that several distinct families lived together. This was probably a deliberate system for avoiding inbreeding.
These findings are revealed in a new study led by researchers from Uppsala University in collaboration with several French institutions. The study is published in the journal PNAS.
In the study, the researchers have succeeded in obtaining biomolecular data from human skeletons buried at iconic sites in France, such as Téviec and Hoedic in Brittany, as well as Champigny. The remains were dated to the very last stages of the Mesolithic (approximately 6,700 years ago), when the last Western European hunter-gatherers lived, overlapping with the Neolithic, when settled farmers took over.
