Friday, June 07, 2024

Graves of Celtic princes suggest powerful role for women in ancient Germany

Amazing stuff!

"They were likely the two biggest men their society ever produced. When they died, around 510 B.C.E., they were nearly 2 meters tall and buried 10 kilometers apart in two fine graves, surrounded by gilded drinking horns, rich cloth, and finery of gold, amber, and ivory. The men were prominent early Celts, part of a group that flourished north of the Alps between 700 and 400 B.C.E. But that’s not the most remarkable thing about them.

Genetic results from their skeletons, along with more than two dozen other sets of remains in the region, suggest this culture passed power through the female line. In contrast to most societies, the status of these early Celtic people—including the two tall princes—was determined by the status of their mothers, researchers report today in Nature Human Behaviour. ..."

From the abstract:
"The early Iron Age (800 to 450 BCE) in France, Germany and Switzerland, known as the ‘West-Hallstattkreis’, stands out as featuring the earliest evidence for supra-regional organization north of the Alps. Often referred to as ‘early Celtic’, suggesting tentative connections to later cultural phenomena, its societal and population structure remain enigmatic. Here we present genomic and isotope data from 31 individuals from this context in southern Germany, dating between 616 and 200 BCE. We identify multiple biologically related groups spanning three elite burials as far as 100 km apart, supported by trans-regional individual mobility inferred from isotope data. These include a close biological relationship between two of the richest burial mounds of the Hallstatt culture. Bayesian modelling points to an avuncular relationship between the two individuals, which may suggest a practice of matrilineal dynastic succession in early Celtic elites. We show that their ancestry is shared on a broad geographic scale from Iberia throughout Central-Eastern Europe, undergoing a decline after the late Iron Age (450 BCE to ~50 CE)."

Graves of Celtic princes suggest powerful role for women in ancient Germany | Science | AAAS


Fig. 1: Fine-scale familial relationships and patterns of individual mobility between early Celtic sites.


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