Research that combines experiences from disciplines has revealed that genes and culture do not have to coincide. The latest findings from the European Research Council’s HistoGenes project come from a genetic study of burial sites from the Avar era to the 8th century AD. The Avars arrived in the 6th century from the steppes of eastern Asia and settled in central and eastern Europe as part of a combined population.
Despite its archaeological heritage, many questions remain. Were the other people buried at those sites descendants of the Avar conquerors or of the past population incorporated into Avar society?Or had those two teams been combined for a long time, as many expected?The investigation The construction of two giant sites south of Vienna, 500 graves in Mödling and only about 150 in Leobersdorf, has yielded unforeseen results.
When the researchers looked at ancient DNA extracted from human remains at nearby sites, they were very surprised. While the population of Leobersdorf was mainly of East Asian origin, those buried at Mödling had ancestors related to European populations. “The genetic difference between those groups is very transparent and consistent for most Americans at the sites,” says Ke Wang, a geneticist and one of the study’s lead authors.
Before genetic analysis, no large difference between the sites had been observed. The archaeological remains of the two communities and their way of life were very similar. “The cultural integration apparently worked despite major genetic differences, and these people were obviously regarded as Avars,” says Walter Pohl from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a historian and one of the senior authors of the study.
Peaceful coexistence
Historical records match the evidence from anthropology and archaeology that this was one of the most peaceful periods in the history of the Vienna Basin, despite the warrior reputation of the Avars. “We found no war wounds in the skeletons and there are virtually no symptoms of deterioration,” says Doris Pany-Kucera, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in Vienna and one of the study’s lead authors. placed in tombs.
Thanks to the sampling strategy and delicate genetic analysis, it was possible to detect a large number of relatives among the deceased. “The enormous number of genetic relationships among Americans allowed us to reconstruct new pedigrees over six generations at each site,” says Zuzana Hofmanová of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. geneticist and one of the lead authors of the study.
The only unusual thing is that the Americans had no biological connection to anyone else in their cemetery. Still, researchers discovered no blood relationship, even among remote relatives. Interestingly, they were able to verify that almost none of the mothers had local ancestors, so they had to come from other regions and communities. However, there was practically no genetic link between Mödling and Leobersdorf.
Both communities followed a similar social practice in choosing partners from certain other communities, through which their different ancestry was preserved: the women that became mothers in Leobersdorf apparently came from communities that also descended from East Asia (possibly from the centre of the Avar realm), while in Mödling they were of European descent. Yet they did not differ in status or wealth. “Status symbols such as belt fittings depicting griffins, and their culture and customs were the same. Most likely both considered themselves Avars,” says Bendeguz Tobias, an archeologist and one of the lead authors of the study.
Studies of this magnitude, which systematically investigate burial sites, are still rare in the field. “The Mödling cemetery is one of the largest ever genetically analyzed, and these effects offer wonderful prospects for long-term studies in different disciplines,” says Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the lead authors of the study. study.
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Materials provided through the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Note: Content may be edited according to taste and length.
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