Reports of Neolithic Irish god-kings, descended through an incest-practicing social elite, are lacking in evidence, say a group of researchers taking a closer look at the tomb of Newgrange and questioning earlier assertions.
In 2020, stories began to appear across the media, telling the tale of a skull fragment discovered inside a stone age monument, genetically analyzed to be an individual descended from either parent and child or sibling incest, with modern commentators drawing comparisons to the incestuous bloodlines of ancient Egyptian and Incan rulers.
Now, an international team led by University College Dublin researchers, collaborating with colleagues from the University of Bergen, Australian National University, University of York, University of Exeter, University of Liverpool, and the private company Archaeological Consultancy Services Unit, are providing evidence that the tomb of Newgrange may not represent the type of royal burial place previously suggested.
Neolithic Evidence
Adding fuel to the fire was the confirmation that remains in passage tombs at other locations across the Emerald Isle belonged to relatives of the individual who left the skull fragment at Newgrange, possibly indicating a royal lineage. Yet, there was a major flaw in this theory, as it attempted to draw comparisons to political systems that were many thousands of miles distant, drawing on the practices of peoples like the Incas who had no contact with Neolithic Ireland.
Researchers may have located relatives of the deceased individual found at Newgrange, but identified no other cases of incest in Stone Age Ireland or Britain, aligning with a general lack of indications of prehistoric European inbreeding more broadly. A single specimen does not provide adequate evidence to suggest an ongoing practice of incest.
False Parallels
“Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period. Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities,” said lead author Associate Professor Jessica Smyth of University College Dublin.
Beyond the question of inbreeding, the very existence of any hereditary power structure lacks evidence at the site. The team sees evidence of a hierarchical society, yet not of what would be recognizable as a “king.” The genetic relations discovered between the various tombs were quite distant, separated by several generations of direct descent or multiple degrees of cousinship.
Unlike the lack of incest evidence at Newgrange, greater Europe does host some evidence of closer family lineages occupying tombs, possibly suggesting hereditary rule elsewhere at the time. Still, those close genetic relationships are absent in Irish burials of the period.
“People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs – the whole community does not end up in these monuments,” said Professor Smyth. “However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.”
“For these reasons, the media claims that there was an incestuous ruling elite in Stone Age Ireland did not match our understanding of society at this time, it did not fit the evidence very well,” said co-author Associate Professor Neil Carlin, also of University College Dublin.
The Mysterious Newgrange Site
In what is now Boyne Valley, County Meath, a Neolithic Irish farming community constructed Newgrange approximately 5,000 years ago, predating the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge, and sealed off sometime around 2500 BCE. First uncovered in 1699, modern archaeological work at the site did not begin until the 1960s, with frequent disturbances to the site occurring in the intervening centuries.
“Burnt and unburnt fragments from just five people were recovered from the 1960s excavations of the tomb. Due to the high levels of disturbance in the centuries before that, we don’t know if this number was originally much higher,” said Professor Carlin.
The people who created the structure remain elusive, due to a tendency for researchers to investigate Irish megalithic monuments separately from other structures and cultural remains of groups that created them. This leaves any ideas of how the burials may have related to Neolithic power structures all the more difficult to fully grasp.
Further muddying the waters are unreliable and contradictory accounts of how bones were positioned when first discovered by antiquarians upon the tomb’s rediscovery.
The recent paper, “The ‘King’ of Newgrange? A Critical Analysis of a Neolithic Petrous Fragment from the Passage Tomb Chamber” appeared on June 24, 2025, in Antiquity.
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.