Kinship Without Blood: What Ancient DNA Can’t See

If you take a cluster of burials and sequence the DNA, you can do something that would have sounded impossible a few decades ago. You can reconstruct pedigrees. Parent and child. Siblings. Cousins. Sometimes entire family trees unfolding across generations.

It feels definitive. Clean lines. Measurable relationships.

Then the archaeology gets in the way.

Sabina Cveček documenting pottery assemblage from an ancient house from a 5,000-year old house at Çukuriçi Höyük in western Türkiye, offering insight into everyday life and kinship practices in Early Bronze Age households. Photo by Maria Röcklinger. Credit: Maria Röcklinger.

At Çatalhöyük, people were buried beneath house floors. The intuitive assumption was straightforward. A house contains a family. A burial beneath that house marks membership in that family. Ancient DNA has complicated that picture in a way that is difficult to ignore. Individuals buried together were often not biologically related at all.

Not distantly related. Not ambiguously related. Not related.

So what were they?

That question sits at the center of what Sabina Cveček and colleagues call “kinship trouble.”¹ It is not a technical problem. The sequencing works. The statistics are getting better. The issue is conceptual. We are asking genetic data to answer a question it was never designed to answer.

Sabina Cveček documenting an assemblage of mollusk shells from a 5,000-year-old domestic context at Çukuriçi Höyük in western Türkiye. Credit: Stephanie Emra.