Four-thousand-year-old genomes show deep roots of social inequality

喀秋莎 2019-10-13 5822

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    In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have used ancient DNA to reconstruct the family trees of dozens of individuals who lived in a small German valley around 4,000 years ago.


    The genealogies point to social inequality within individual households, which encompassed both high-status family members and unrelated, low-status individuals — possibly servants or even slaves — as well as mysterious foreign females related to no one else.


    Such insights could never have been made without using ancient DNA, says Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, who co-led the study. “For me, this is the future of archaeology,” he says. “We are now forced to see social inequality and complexity on a completely different scale, that we haven’t taken into account for the deep past.” The team published its results in Science on 10 October.

Ancient elite

    During the Bronze Age, the Lech River Valley in southern Bavaria was packed with small farmsteads, each with its own cemetery. Many of these hamlets were first discovered as the modern city of Augsburg sprawled into nearby countryside during the 1980s and 1990s. Archaeological excavations uncovered dozens of skeletons dating between about 2800 and 1700 BC.


    Grave goods from these burials, such as daggers, arrowheads and ornaments, suggest that many Lech Valley inhabitants were well off, although the region lacks the mound-like ‘princely graves’ found elsewhere in Bronze Age Europe. Those often contain huge gold artefacts and show evidence of a social elite, archaeologists say.


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    To better understand the social structure of the Lech Valley, Stockhammer and Johannes Krause, at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Jena, Germany, and their team sequenced DNA from 104 individuals from 13 farmstead cemeteries. They identified six family trees, which encompassed as many as five generations.

    Nearly all first- and second-degree relationships the team uncovered were between individuals from the same farmstead; a few, more distant relations were found in different hamlets. These close family members, either male or female, tended to be buried alongside ample stashes of grave goods, suggesting high status was inherited. Cemeteries contained two other groups of individuals who were unrelated to any family members: people with poorly furnished graves, and high-status females.

    It is impossible to say whether the low-status individuals represent servants, farm workers or slaves, according to the authors. The social structures of the Lech Valley are reminiscent of those in ancient Greece and Rome, where slaves were considered members of the family unit. “It’s much more complex than we thought for a farmstead around 2000 BC,” Stockhammer says.

    The role of the high-status females is even more enigmatic. These women, who were buried with ornaments and jewellery similar to those of the female family members, grew up hundreds of kilometres away, Stockhammer says: the levels of strontium isotopes in their teeth are unlike those present in southern Germany. The levels of these isotopes vary with local geochemistry, and the women showed levels more similar to those found in eastern Germany and the Czech Republic.

    But no children of theirs were found in the Lech Valley graves. One possibility is that females travelled hundreds of kilometres to the Lech Valley as part of alliances between wealthy families, and that any children were then returned to their mothers’ native lands. The grave goods of some of the foreign females resemble those of the Únětice culture in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Poland from around the same time.

Who's who

“It’s a really, really beautiful paper,” says Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “I know we’ll see more of this.” In unpublished work, he and colleagues sequenced DNA from more than 100 individuals from southern Germany and built family trees from the data.

“It does get to the heart of what archaeologists have been trying to do. They spend a lot of time working out who’s related to who in cemeteries,” says evolutionary geneticist Krishna Veeramah at Stony Brook University in New York. But sequencing DNA from hundreds of individuals from a cemetery is likely to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he notes, so few archaeologists will have access to the approach until costs come down.

    The study marks a shift in how ancient genomics has been applied to archaeology, say Kristiansen and others. Many earlier studies — especially of Bronze Age Europe — sampled large numbers of unrelated individuals spread across dozens of sites in multiple countries. Many studies went on to document profound shifts in the genetic make-up of a region’s inhabitants, to the chagrin of archaeologists who tend to focus on local change and the lives of individuals.

“Instead of talking about a spread of an ancestry, we’re really getting deep into the living history of these people,” says Alissa Mittnik, a geneticist at MPI-SHH and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the Science study. She hopes that the profound ancestry shifts that earlier studies identified can be explained in more depth. For instance, her team reports that nearly all women in the Lech Valley had moved away from their families — potentially spreading new cultural practices and ancestry.

    And as the number of sequenced ancient human genomes swells into the thousands, researchers will be able to build even bigger ancient family trees and identify distant relatives, just as customers of consumer-genetics firms such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com do today. Some of the individuals studied by Stockhammer, Mittnik and their collaborators turned out to be related to two other Lech Valley inhabitants whose genomes were sequenced as part of a 2015 study of 101 ancient humans. They were from a nearby burial, but, with luck, more distant connections will emerge, Mittnik says. “One day we’ll find where these foreign women in the Lech Valley came from. That would be amazing.”

doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03046-w


我在上班,别发骚图了。
最新回复 (8)
  • 逢雨笙 2019-10-13
    0 2
    看不懂
    ------一只特立独行的羊
  • 联盟X 2019-10-13
    0 3
    洋文不好啊。
    匡扶汉室!
  • 喀秋莎 2019-10-13
    0 4
    联盟X 洋文不好啊。
    没办法,搞科研的,读文献都是洋文,谁让人家牛逼呢。
    我在上班,别发骚图了。
  • 革子令 2019-10-13
    0 5
    四千年前的基因组显示出社会不平等的深层根源

    在一项史无前例的研究中,科学家们利用古老的DNA重建了大约4000年前生活在德国小山谷中的数十个人的家谱。

        族谱表明各个家庭内部的社会不平等,既包括地位高的家庭成员和无关的,地位低的个人(可能是仆人甚至是奴隶),也包括彼此之间无亲属的神秘外国女性。

        共同领导这项研究的德国慕尼黑路德维希马克西米利安大学的考古学家菲利普·斯托克汉默说,如果不使用古老的DNA,就不可能获得这样的见解。他说:“对我来说,这就是考古学的未来。” “我们现在被迫以完全不同的规模看待社会不平等和复杂性,而我们并没有考虑到过去的情况。”该团队于10月10日在《科学》杂志上发表了其结果。

    古代精英
        在青铜时代,巴伐利亚南部的莱希河谷到处都是小型农庄,每个农庄都有自己的墓地。在1980年代和1990年代,现代城市奥格斯堡(Augsburg)蔓延到附近的乡村时,首先发现了许多小村庄。考古发掘发现了大约公元前2800年至1700年之间的数十具骨骼。

        这些墓葬中的坟墓物品,如匕首,箭头和装饰品,表明莱希河谷的许多居民都富裕起来,尽管该地区没有在欧洲青铜时代其他地方见到的像丘一样的“王子坟墓”。考古学家说,那些通常包含巨大的金制品,并显示出社会精英的证据。
    为了更好地了解莱希河谷的社会结构,位于德国耶拿的马克斯·普朗克人类历史科学研究所(MPI-SHH)的Stockhammer和Johannes Krause及其团队对来自13个农庄墓地的104个人的DNA进行了测序。他们确定了六棵家谱,涵盖多达五代。

        团队发现的几乎所有一级和二级关系都来自同一农庄的个体之间。在不同的小村庄中发现了一些更远的关系。这些亲密的家庭成员,不论是男性还是女性,都倾向于被埋在大量的坟墓旁边,这表明继承了很高的地位。墓地里还有另外两个与家庭成员无关的人:坟墓装饰不佳的人和地位高的女性。

        作者认为,地位低下的人是代表仆人,农场工人还是奴隶是不可能的。莱希河谷的社会结构让人联想到古希腊和罗马,那里的奴隶被视为家庭成员。 Stockhammer说:“这比我们想像的公元前2000年的农庄要复杂得多。”

        地位高的女性的角色更加神秘。 Stockhammer说,这些被埋葬了类似于女性家庭成员的装饰品和珠宝的妇女长大了数百公里,她们牙齿中锶同位素的含量与德国南部的不同。这些同位素的水平随当地的地球化学而变化,这些妇女的水平与德国东部和捷克共和国的水平更加相似。

        但是在莱希河谷的坟墓中没有发现他们的孩子。一种可能性是,作为富裕家庭之间的同盟关系的一部分,女性走了数百公里到莱希河谷,然后所有孩子都被送回了母亲的故土。大约在同一时间,一些外国女性的坟墓类似于捷克共和国,东德和波兰的thenětice文化。

    谁的谁
    瑞典哥德堡大学的考古学家克里斯蒂安·克里斯蒂安森(Kristian Kristiansen)说:“这是非常非常漂亮的论文。” “我知道我们会看到更多。”在未出版的工作中,他和同事们对来自德国南部100多个个体的DNA进行了测序,并根据数据构建了家谱。

    “这的确成为考古学家一直试图做的事情的核心。他们花费大量时间来研究谁与墓地里的人有关系。”纽约斯托尼布鲁克大学的进化遗传学家Krishna Veeramah说。但他指出,从墓地对数百个人进行DNA测序可能要花费数十万美元,因此,直到成本降低之前,很少有考古学家可以使用这种方法。

        克里斯蒂安森(Kristiansen)等人说,这项研究标志着古代基因组学在考古学中的应用方式发生了转变。许多早期的研究(尤其是欧洲青铜时代的研究)对分布在多个国家/地区数十个地点的大量无关个体进行了抽样调查。许多研究继续证明该地区居民的基因组成发生了深远的变化,引起了考古学家的who恼,他们倾向于关注局部变化和个人生活。

    MPI-SHH和位于马萨诸塞州波士顿的哈佛医学院的遗传学家Alissa Mittnik说:“我们不是在谈论祖先的传播,而是在真正了解这些人的生活史。”科学研究。她希望可以更深入地解释早期研究确定的深刻血统。例如,她的团队报告说,莱希河谷的几乎所有妇女都离开了家庭,这有可能传播新的文化习俗和血统。

        随着测序的古代人类基因组数量激增至数千种,研究人员将能够建立更大的古代家谱并鉴定远亲,就像今天的消费者遗传公司(例如23andMe和Ancestry.com)的客户一样。 Stockhammer,Mittnik及其合作者研究的一些人原来与莱希河谷的另外两个居民有关,他们的基因组被测序,作为2015年对101位古代人类的研究的一部分。米特尼克说,他们来自附近的葬礼,但幸运的是,将会出现更遥远的联系。 “有一天,我们会发现莱希河谷的这些外国妇女来自哪里。这将是惊人的。”

    谷歌翻译daze
    我好喜欢病娇
  • 革子令 2019-10-13
    0 6
    翻译之后也很难懂,行行隔层山啊
    我好喜欢病娇
  • 0 7
    666
    神州平板我看行!
  • 0 8
    革子令 四千年前的基因组显示出社会不平等的深层根源 在一项史无前例的研究中,科学家们利用古老的DNA重建了大约4000年前生活在德国小山谷中的数十个人的家谱。 族谱表明各个家庭内部的社会不 ...
    【作者认为,地位低下的人是代表仆人,农场工人还是奴隶是不可能的。】
    …………
    【  It is impossible to say whether the low-status individuals represent servants, farm workers or slaves, according to the authors. 】
    有时候直接机翻还是不靠谱……
    这句话是说:根据作者们的说法,几乎不可能确定这些地位低下的成员到底是代表仆人、农场工人还是奴隶。

    嘛……虽然在下也知道机翻还是省事就是了。
    站在最黑暗的地方遥望光明。
  • 0 9
    最大的问题是,这篇文章到底是要探讨古代社会不平等,还是探讨人员长距离流动的现象(混乱ing)
    站在最黑暗的地方遥望光明。
    • ACG里世界
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