Investigating questions of kinship in the ancient world, archaeologists have discovered that treating non-blood relatives as family members is an idea that dates back to humanity’s deeper history.
According to new research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, DNA research at sites like Turkey’s famous Çatalhöyük and others in Europe and Asia shows that, on large scales throughout prehistory, humans considered individuals not related by blood to be family members, as evidenced by co-burial practices.
The new work demonstrates that sharing DNA has not been the only way families and societies were defined in the ancient past, offering a broader view of what kinship meant to our ancient ancestors.
Rethinking Kinship
Exploring the topic of kinship yields so many approaches and questions that it warranted its own special issue of the journal, including an introductory piece that collates research by archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists on humanity’s complex ideas of family throughout time. In their introduction, the editors note that this work challenges traditional assumptions in archaeology that privilege biological descent in analyses of family structures.
“Even in prehistory, kinship was more than just blood relations,” said lead author and special issue editor Sabina Cveček, an archaeologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Many communities around the world have a concept of family that goes beyond this biological setting. So no matter how hard we push with ancient DNA research, we’ll never know the whole story if we don’t take diversity and cultural anthropological perspectives into account.”
“The piece intervenes by showing that this is only one ‘code’ of relatedness. Instead, ancient kinship research is in need of new approaches by closely considering the ethics of sampling human remains, interdisciplinary training, collaborative research design, and new interpretations that consider multiple ways of becoming kin,” Cveček added.
Kinship in Europe and Asia
Focusing on Europe and western Asia, the researchers reviewed genetic and archaeological studies conducted in previous decades to better understand views of kinship in the remote past. At Turkey’s Çatalhöyük site, archaeologists uncovered fascinating 8,000-year-old burials beneath ancient homes.
”Archaeologists initially assumed that people buried within the same house would be genetically related,” explained Cveček. “But now, it is possible to map those people through ancient DNA analysis on genetic pedigrees, and geneticists often found people buried within the same house who are not at all genetically related, indicating social proximity rather than exclusively blood relations made kin at the site.”
While DNA degrades with age, small traces within bones, such as those of the inner ear, remain somewhat viable for much longer time scales. From what remains of the DNA in ancient bone samples, geneticists can retrieve a patchy gene sequence.
“Geneticists need to do a lot of computational analysis and statistics with genetic signatures from those broken pieces of ancient DNA to actually reconstruct biological relatedness of the past,” says Cveček.
Kinship DNA Results
While adoption and other forms of non-blood-related families exist today, this is an important finding about how kinship was viewed in the ancient world. It reveals that DNA isn’t the only thing dictating how families were constructed and how lineage was passed down long ago; instead, a more diverse experience persisted. Moving forward, the researchers recommend a larger role for anthropologists in these discussions, which have thus far been largely limited to archaeologists and geneticists.
“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,” Cveček explained.
“The old saying, that it takes a village to raise a child, is true,” concluded Cveček. “We all invest time and labor to build a world that looks after people beyond our biological dependents.”
The paper, “Kinship Trouble: What, When, Where, Why, and How — and So What?,” appeared in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal on April 14, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.