An historical cemetery reveals a Celtic tribe that lived in England 2,000 years in the past and that was organized round maternal lineages, in accordance with a DNA evaluation.
Jan. 15, 2025, 11:00 a.m. ET
A tantalizing imaginative and prescient of a women-centric society has emerged from an historical cemetery within the bucolic countryside of southwest England.
Whereas girls generally left residence to hitch their husbands’ households upon marriage, the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe that lived in Dorset 2,000 years in the past, bucked the mould with a system known as matrilocality, whereby girls remained of their ancestral communities and males migrated for marriage.
By analyzing the genomes of 57 Durotrigan individuals buried someday from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 100, scientists discovered maternal lineages typical of matrilocality. This was the primary time this method had been recognized in European prehistory.
In the meantime, people with ancestries unrelated to the dominant line have been largely males, suggesting that they’d moved from different communities to dwell with the households of their wives, in accordance with a study publishedon Wednesday within the journal Nature.
“I used to be not anticipating such a powerful signature of matrilocality,” mentioned Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity School Dublin who led the examine. “When that got here out of the info, it was a little bit of a shock.”
“However upon reflection, in case you have a look at what classical writers have been speaking about and in case you have a look at the archaeological context, there are quite a lot of hints that ladies have been in a position to attain excessive standing in these societies,” she added.
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