The exposed foundation walls of Çatalhöyük (Image: Interfoto/Alamy)

Blood may not always be thicker than water, if a controversial finding from one of the world’s best-preserved Stone Age settlements is to be believed. At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.

Discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük’s many buildings are built so close together that people had to get in through the roof. Its inhabitants farmed crops and domesticated animals, and experimented with painting and sculpture.

They also buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses, suggesting that people were buried where they lived. So Marin Pilloud of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hickam, Hawaii, realised she could work out who lived together.


With Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus, Pilloud took detailed measurements of the teeth from 266 skeletons. Closely related individuals have more similar teeth than unrelated individuals, so she could get a measure of how related the remains were.

No nuclear

Because Çatalhöyük is made up solely of small houses, Pilloud expected it to be organised rather like a modern village, with “small nuclear families living together and defining the community”, she says. So people buried together should have been more closely related than people from different houses.

But she found no pattern at all. “It does not appear that individuals that were buried together were closely related to each other,” she says. “Çatalhöyük was likely not centred around nuclear families.”

More recent burial sites have tended to show strong familial patterns, but no other Stone Age site has been analysed in this way, so there’s no way to know if Çatalhöyük is typical of the time.

We are used to the idea that living in close contact with our relatives helps to promote our own genetic inheritance and keep hold of our money and possessions over the generations. So why should Stone Age populations be different?

Coming and going

Pilloud thinks Çatalhöyük developed its odd social structure as the people began settling down and farming, rather than hunting and gathering. “It makes a lot of sense to shift to a community-centred society with the adoption of agriculture,” she says. People living in close quarters all year round and working together to produce food needed to create a strong community, rather than only cooperating with relatives.

Another explanation might be that earlier hunter-gatherer societies were also less family-centric than we thought. Kim Hill, of Arizona State University in Tempe has found that modern hunter-gatherer societies are extremely fluid, with both males and females regularly leaving the group they were born in. That means many individuals within each group are completely unrelated (Science, vol 331, p 1286).

Çatalhöyük society looks remarkably similar, Hill says. “This might imply that such patterns are ancient, common, and persisted even in the early transition from foraging to farming.”

Family genes

It would have been better to use DNA samples to look for kinship, says Colin Renfrew, of the University of Cambridge. “I have always been rather unimpressed by dental data as indicating biological kinship.”

However, Çatalhöyük’s warm climate may have long since destroyed the skeletons’ DNA, Renfrew adds. DNA has been recovered from German Stone Age farmers, but in that case researchers did not attempt to discern their social structure (PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000536).

Although DNA analysis would be ideal, the research is nevertheless “quite pioneering”, says Roger Matthews of the University of Reading in the UK. “It adds to the already strong evidence that biological kinship need not have had much significance in early prehistoric societies.”

Journal reference: American Journal of Physical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21520