A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in late February suggested that human societies likely developed cultural strategies to mitigate inbreeding roughly 8,000 years ago.
The research focused on a high-tech analysis of DNA from 10 individuals who lived in northwestern France between 6,350 and 4,810 B.C., which revealed very few biological relationships between those who lived in the communities. “Contrary to expectation, individuals buried together did not have close biological kin relationships,” the researchers noted.
Apparently, these last hunter-gatherer groups also refrained from interbreeding with the agricultural communities that were becoming dominant in the area, the study found. Instead, the separate tribes functioned as “distinct social units within a network of exchanging mates.”
The bodies scholars analyzed came from the coastal archaeological sites in Téviec and Hoedic, and are believed to be sites of hunter-gatherer communities (though there is much debate over the development of human society in this part of Europe, as well as in Asia and Africa, at this moment in time).
“We know that there were distinct social units — with different dietary habits — and a pattern of groups emerges that was probably part of a strategy to avoid inbreeding,” researcher Luciana Simoes said in a statement.
France Decides To Bring Ancient Curses Upon Itself By Effing With Historical Artifacts | @DailyCaller
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“Many people often erroneously equate hunting-and-gathering with simplicity or even primitiveness,” Rutgers University genetics professor Christina Bergey, who was not involved with the study, told Live Science. “Perhaps complex social boundaries and identities persisted, even as most of our species moved toward agricultural societies.” (RELATED: Ancient Discovery In Greece May Completely Rewrite The Human Story)
Another example of how strange these findings are is that, in one of the Hoedic graves, a body of a young woman and four-to-seven-year-old girl were found together, indicating they were probably family. But DNA analysis revealed that they weren’t. So what were they?
Maybe the little girl’s mother died in childbirth, and her father found a new wife from another hunter-gatherer tribe. She was probably afraid her new mom would beat her when Daddy was out hunting. Instead, step-mother and step-daughter formed an inseparable bond. They had something in common, after all. The little girl felt the loss of the mother she couldn’t remember, while the new wife had left behind her own mother — as well as everyone else she’d ever known — to marry into a new community. In the end, perhaps, an illness carried both of them off, but the two were so inseparable in life that their tribe couldn’t imagine parting them in death.
This is just a guess, of course, but it’s good to remember that these people were human beings, not just data points in a study. They may have lived 9,000 years ago, but in all the ways that matter, they really were just like us.