Roaming Ancestry – Landscapes of social and genetic relations in prehistory

Kinship systems and networks of contact and exchange in prehistoric societies could so far only be studied indirectly.

Recent advances in archaeogenetics have enabled the retrieval of ancient genomic data with high success rates, which often allows the study of nearly all individuals from the same archaeological site, making intra-site studies become reality.

Estimating degrees of biological relatedness and demonstrating biological unrelatedness can form a robust scaffold to reconstruct social and kin relations, which permit stable inferences on kinship structures and social organisation in prehistoric societies.

Further analytical advances that estimate shared identity-by-descent between individuals can identify biological relatives up to the 10th degree, which has enabled the detection of distant relatives between different sites.

Many such connections across sites and regions can be found in the published ancient human genomes from Europes prehistory, and the chances to find more scales up quadratically with the number of individuals studied.

Through full integration of archaeological, anthropological, isotopic and other context data, it will for the first time be possible to match levels of resolution in archaeology and genetics, to map relationships over geographic distances, and to learn how prehistoric communities were organised, interacted and formed networks.

Given these exciting prospects, this project will enhance the data density in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe by including new well-contextualised sites and regions at our disposal with the aim to build comprehensive maps of contact, trade and exchange based on quantifiable and statistically robust measures.

This unique, large-scale, spatio-temporal reference dataset will allow us to use innovative integrated modelling approaches that explore theoretical frameworks and kinship models from ethnographic studies, and to produce novel insights into the evolution and structures of human societies.