DNA from a 5,200-year-old Irish tomb hints at ancient royal incest
A man buried in a huge, roughly 5,200-year-old Irish stone tomb was the product of incest, a new study finds. DNA extracted from the ancient man’s remains displays an unusually large number of identical versions of the same genes. That pattern indicates that his parents were either a brother and sister or a parent and child, a team led by geneticists Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley of Trinity College Dublin reports June 17 in Nature. That new DNA discovery combined with the monumental tomb suggests that ruling families who wielded enough power to direct big building projects emerged among some early European farming communities, the researchers contend. The man’s bones had previously been found in the Newgrange passage tomb, an earthen mound covering more than 4,000 square meters near the River Boyne. A rooftop opening in a 19-meter-long stone passage allows sunlight to reach deep into a chamber inside the mound on the...