You probably have a member of your family that you're not related to by blood—a step-parent, an adopted cousin, your mom's best friend who you grew up calling your aunt. They're indisputably part of your family, but a DNA test wouldn't hint at your relationship. Archaeologists are finding that this holds true for families from thousands of years ago, too.

Excerpt

What ancient families can teach today

These findings suggest that in these ancient communities, the concept of family wasn’t only dictated by blood. Since the same is true of many families today, that may not seem like an Earth-shattering discovery. But it could be a critical piece of information for researchers attempting to reconstruct how ancient cultures built and passed down their family ties. DNA doesn’t always tell the whole story.

“One of the aims of this paper is to debunk the Western perceptions of family kinship, which often seems to be based on blood. We cannot have just one proxy for understanding family or kinship around the world,” says Cveček.

Research article (open access)

  • reallykindasorta@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    DNA research is new and there are a therefore a profusion of articles coming out reasoning around DNA. A lot of these are relatively quick statistics papers and similar to other areas that rely heavily on statistical correlations, there is an outsized amount of careless research in this area. Glad to see some thoughtful meta research about DNA research in general and what kind of information it does and does not provide.