Intrapopulational relationships in ancient societies: a multidisciplinary study

Kinship determination is one of the major challenges for the anthropologist studying graveyard populations. Traditional techniques based on morphological comparisons of bone remains are limited. However, recent methods which generate and characterise DNA sequences derived from bones bear the possibility for a more accurate analysis. Extraction and characterisation of authentic nucleic acids was performed on a number of individuals from the early Medieval graveyard of Neresheim, South Germany. From this cemetery a total of 38 skeletal remains of individuals buried between 450 and 700 AD were examined using PCR-based methods. Comparisons were made using four human-specific short tandem repeat loci and the X/Y-specific amelogenin sex test. Twenty-eight of the approximately 1,500-year-old individuals yielded alleles in at least one of the polymorphic nuclear loci HumCD4, HumFES, HumTH01, HumVWA, and the sex test. These along with a 96 bp DNA variant previously unknown in recent CD4 contexts, and supporting evidence from anthropology and archaeology were used for defining one parental and one filial generation in each of three multiple burials (Ne 2, Ne 9 and Ne 78) in the cemetery.