Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials

Sweden’s Medieval Graves Placed Children With Unrelated Adults, Including Infant Girls Buried Among Men

Learn how ancient DNA shows that children in medieval Sweden often shared graves with adults of the same sex rather than close biological relatives.

Medieval babies and adults buried together in Sweden were not related, archaeologists discover — raising big questions about early Christian burial practices

Early Christian communities in Sweden often buried children in the same grave with adults, but archaeologists have found that these individuals rarely shared close biological ties, raising the question of how medieval people interred their dead.In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 142 skeletons from three cemeteries in Sweden dating to the 10th to 14th centuries, focusing on collective burials in which two or more people were buried i…

Ancient DNA challenges family assumptions in medieval Scandinavian graves

When archaeologists find adults and children buried together in medieval graves, it is often assumed that they were members of the same family. A new study from Stockholm University in Science Advances suggests otherwise.

Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials

Abstract Sexing the skeletal remains of young individuals is crucial yet notoriously difficult in archaeology. Children, who cannot be reliably sexed morphologically, are often excluded from gender-related research, limiting our understanding of past childhood. This issue is compounded in contexts lacking grave goods, such as early Christian burials. We conducted genomic screening of 142 individuals from Sweden dating from the late Viking Age to…