Legacy Matters
Discovered in a tender embrace, the first known nuclear family
A Stone Age burial ground, where the bodies of adults and children lay together for thousands of years entwined in tender embraces, has provided the earliest evidence for the existence of the nuclear family.
DNA tests on four skeletons from one of the graves have shown that the family unit of mother, father and their biological children goes back at least 4,600 years, when these bodies were carefully interred after a violent death.
The Stone Age site near Eulau in Germany contains the skeletons of several groups of adults and children buried facing one another in an arrangement that may mirror their relationships in life, scientists said yesterday.
In one grave, a mother is embracing her son, while crouching next to her in the same grave is the father with his arms around their elder son. "A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family," the scientists said in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.