DNA analysis shows that the Greeks married their cousins.

When Heinrich Schliemann discovered over a hundred years ago mycenaean tombs, with golden masks and treasures, he could only guess who the people buried in them were. Now, thanks to DNA sequencing, scientists know much more.

AND team of scientists under the direction of the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. Max Planck in Leipzig (Germany) analyzed a hundred genomes of the Aegean peoples of the Bronze Age.

The analyzes allowed us to find out the connections attitude and the rules governing marriages in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, two pre-Hellenic civilizations that emerged around the Aegean and developed during the Bronze Age, almost 4,000 years ago.

The results will be published this Monday at Ecology of nature and evolution.

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed more than a hundred genomes from the Aegean peoples, which is not possible “without great collaboration with our partners in Greece and around the world,” said archaeologist Philip Stockhammer, one of the lead authors of the study.

Thanks to recent advances in sequencing technology, they have been able to extract large amounts of data even in places where climatic conditions (mainly heat and humidity) make it difficult to preserve ancient DNA, such as in Greece.

The study was able to trace the kinship of the inhabitants of the house in the Mycenaean village of 1700 BC. This is the first family tree traced through the DNA of the entire ancient Mediterranean region.

Analysis

analysis indicate that some of the sons apparently continued to live in their parents’ village until adulthood and were in fact buried in a grave under the farmyard.

In addition, one of the wives who married in the house added her sister to the family, since her son was also buried in the same grave.

But the authors made another completely unexpected discovery: about 4,000 years ago in Crete, other Greek islands and on the mainland, it was very common to marry a cousin.

“More than a thousand ancient genomes from different regions of the world have already been published, but it seems that such a strict system of marriage between relatives did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world,” says Eirini Skurtanioti, lead author of the study. who took the test..

The find not only came as a “complete surprise to all of us” but also “raises many questions” about this patrilineal society, the researcher says.

“Perhaps this was a way to prevent more and more fragmentation of inherited farmland. In any case, it guaranteed a certain continuity family in one place, which is an important requirement for growing olives and wine, for example,” suggests Stockhammer.

“It is certain that genome analysis The ancients will continue to give us fantastic new insights into ancient family structures in the future,” concludes Skurtanioti.

(As reported by EFE)