WASHINGTON — A Stone Age burial site in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family.
The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children.
“Their unity in death suggests unity in life,” researchers said in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While tools and remains from the Stone Age have long been studied, there are few clues to the social relationships between people.
Besides the nuclear family in one grave, a second grave held three children, two of which were siblings, buried with a woman to whom they were not maternally related. The researchers think she may have been a paternal aunt or stepmother.
