A Late Stone Age family grave, showing the careful arrangement of bodies. The photo is overlain by a pedigree reconstructed from the genetic results with squares denoting male (Image: National Academy of Sciences/PNAS)

A Stone Age massacre has provided evidence of the earliest known nuclear family. The evidence also suggests that, just like today, some early humans lived in blended families.

Archaeologists have long suspected that people lived in nuclear families at least as far back as the Stone Age. The idea even has a foothold in popular culture – remember Fred, Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone?

But the evidence for Stone Age nuclear families has been flimsy, mainly based on extrapolations from how we live now, and speculations about relationships between adults and children found buried together.


“We have been inferring the past from the present, but it wasn’t necessarily true. Now, we have tested the hypothesis and found that at least one Stone Age nuclear family existed,” says Wolfgang Haak who led a team at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

The new evidence comes from a detailed analysis of the remains of 13 people, buried in four gravesites in Eulau in Germany, dating to the later Stone Age, 4600 years ago.

Family ties

All the signs are that these people died violent deaths – one female had an arrowhead embedded in her spine, and the head and forearms of several other adults and children had stone-axe marks.

Examination of the skeletons found that the adults were aged between 25 to 60 years old – old for that period – and the children younger than 13 years old. Several of the adults had partially healed injuries.

“These were the old and the injured, children and women. Whatever violence happened that day, they were not capable of fighting,” says Haak, now at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at Adelaide University.

Analysis of DNA in the bones and teeth of the remains in one grave found that an adult male and female, and two boys, were the classic nuclear family.

“The two kids have her mitochondrial DNA, and his Y chromosome – that’s a nuclear family,” says molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp of Washington State University in Pullman.

Arm in arm

Fossil evidence of our ancestors in the middle Stone Age is rare, and Haak points out that it is still unknown when nuclear families became common.

Prehistorically, people would have died young in childbirth or from disease, potentially making nuclear families unsustainable. Indeed, in a second grave, the one adult, a woman, was not related to two children, who were a brother and a sister. The team was not able to extract DNA from the remains of a third child, an infant facing the woman.

“The fact that they all ended up in the same grave, makes us think that they had some relationship in life,” says Haas.

The new findings also suggest an explanation for anomalies in how later Stone Age people in central Europe were buried. Typically, males of all ages rest on their right side, facing south, and women on their left side facing south, but sometimes there are exceptions to this rule.

This was the case with the nuclear family, where each child faced north, towards one of the adults with whom their hands entwined. Haak speculates the arrangement may symbolise blood ties.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073_pnas.0807592105)