A multinational and multidisciplinary team of scientists managed to build the oldest family tree in history, its first roots dating back 5,700 years, from which they discovered that a man’s marriage to 4 women was known in England in that stone age, in addition to adoption as well, according to what can be deduced from A study they prepared, the results of which were published in the prestigious British scientific journal Nature, in its issue issued on Wednesday.
The team is made up of archaeologists from the Universities of Newcastle, York, Exeter and Lancashire in the United Kingdom, in addition to geneticists from the Universities of the Basque Country in Spain, and their counterparts from the Universities of Vienna in Austria and Harvard in the United States, who analyzed DNA taken from the bones and teeth of 35 people, whose skeletons are still The skeleton is preserved in a cemetery described as one of the best preserved Stone Age tombs in Britain. It is located in the parish town of the type in the county of Gloucestershire in southwest England, its name is Hazleton North, 130 kilometers from London.
And DNA analysis showed that 27 people were biological relatives from 5 continuous generations of one extended family, “most of them descended from 4 women, who were mothers to children from one man,” according to what was concluded by “Al Arabiya.net” from British media, which summarized In its news, most of the study, which also concluded that adoption was known to that family, and had a biological significance for that society in the Neolithic era, which was reported by the newspaper “The Guardian” about the British Dr. Chris Fowler from Newcastle University, adding that the results of the study “are not less than It’s amazing,” he said.
The Spanish researcher at the University of the Basque Country, Iñigo Olalde, lead geneticist and one of the first signatories to the study, noted that it was “the oldest family tree ever reconstructed” and decided that the description was possible thanks to the “excellent” preservation of DNA in the cemetery and the use of the latest technology. To retrieve and analyze ancient DNA, finding that the dead were buried according to the women they descended from, and that “these women of the first generation had social significance in the memories of that society.