Overview
- The Cambridge Archaeological Journal has released a special issue that pulls together burial and DNA studies showing many co-buried people were not biologically related.
- At Çatalhöyük in today’s Türkiye, burials placed under house floors include people who share no genetic ties, pointing to social bonds as the basis for who was treated as family.
- Editors Sabina Cveček, Maanasa Raghavan, and Penny Bickle argue that recent genetic work has favored lineage charts and that kinship cannot be reduced to shared genes.
- The papers explain that ancient DNA often survives in the dense inner-ear bone, produces patchy sequences, and needs heavy computation to model relatedness, which limits what DNA alone can show.
- The authors call for ethical rules on sampling human remains, collaborative research with local partners, and stronger anthropological input to better capture diverse kinship across Europe and western Asia.