What Ancient DNA Gets Wrong About The Meaning Of Family

A skeleton is pulled from a 5,000-year-old burial site. Scientists extract fragments of ancient DNA, compare genetic sequences, and announce they’ve found a father, a mother, and their biological children. It’s a tidy story, one that feels familiar. But a growing number of researchers are pushing back, arguing that this approach to understanding ancient families is often incomplete and can be misleading if taken too far. Genetic relatedness, they say, is not the same thing as kinship.

What does it mean to be family? For most people alive today, the answer involves far more than shared DNA. Stepparents, godparents, adopted siblings, and chosen families all shape how we understand belonging. That tension between biology and social bonds is ancient, and a new review paper published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal argues that modern science has not fully reckoned with it. The authors introduce the concept of “kinship trouble,” which captures the growing gap between what DNA can tell us about biological relationships and what those relationships actually meant to the people who lived them.

Ancient DNA research has exploded over the past decade, and with it, a tendency to borrow terminology from social and cultural anthropology and apply it to genetic data in ways that are often inaccurate or misleading. The result, the authors contend, is a version of the past that defaults to a present-day westernized perspective, projecting familiar family structures backward through thousands of years. How researchers define ancient kinship can also influence real debates over Indigenous rights, including, in some cases, the return of ancestral remains to descendant communities.

When DNA Meets the Definition of Family

Not a laboratory study presenting new data, this paper is a review and interpretive framework authored by Sabina Cveček, affiliated with the Field Museum of Natural History and the Austrian Academy of Sciences; Maanasa Raghavan of the University of Chicago’s Department of Human Genetics; and Penny Bickle of the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. Together, they represent three fields that rarely sit at the same table: archaeology, genetics, and social-cultural anthropology.

Advanced sequencing technology developed in the late 2000s made it possible to extract and analyze DNA from ancient human remains at unprecedented scale. Specialized software handles the damaged, low-quality DNA found in archaeological samples. These tools can identify close biological relatives, more distant relatives, and even patterns of inbreeding across generations. The results have been genuinely exciting, and the authors acknowledge that ancient DNA methods are “spectacular for the purpose they were developed for.”

Some researchers already distinguish carefully between biological relatedness and social kinship, but more often than not, studies still default to biological frameworks, particularly in Europe and western Asia, where most ancient DNA data has been concentrated.

How Ancient DNA Research Gets Kinship Wrong

Trouble starts when researchers translate biological findings into social conclusions. Two high-profile studies illustrate the tension. One, published in Science, argued for family-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe. Another, in Nature, addressed kinship practices at a Stone Age tomb in the United Kingdom. Both drew on terms like “patrilineality” and “patrilocality,” the practice of couples settling near the husband’s family, to explain patterns in the genetic data. The paper cites these examples not to condemn those studies outright, but to show how interpretive borrowing from anthropology can create confusion when the terms are applied without accounting for their social dimensions.

As the authors explain, tracing ancestry through a chain of parent-child links across generations is not a biological principle. It is an imagined chain of social connections. Finding that a group of buried individuals share DNA through the male line does not mean that society traced ancestry through fathers. It means those particular individuals were biologically related through males. What that relatedness meant socially requires a completely different kind of evidence.

Old Theories, New Data, and What the Evidence Actually Shows

Earlier archaeological theories proposed that Stone Age societies traced ancestry through women and that Bronze Age societies shifted to tracing it through men. Recent genetic evidence has scrambled that picture. Rather than a neat progression, the data suggest that communities following different family structures coexisted in the same regions and time periods. Matrilocality, the practice of couples settling near the wife’s family, appears to be the rule in Iron Age Britain, long after Bronze Age communities in Germany’s Lech Valley appear to have followed the opposite pattern. A single evolutionary path from one kinship system to another, the authors conclude, “does not appear to be the case in European prehistory.”

The Ethical Stakes of Defining Ancient Kinship

Perhaps the most urgent section of the paper addresses ethics. In some cases, DNA-based definitions of biological kinship have been used as the standard for determining whether ancestral remains could be returned to Indigenous communities, a practice that can clash with how those communities define belonging. Indigenous groups may recognize kinship through shared cultural practices, oral histories, or relationships with ancestral lands, none of which show up in a genetic test.

Calling for research that is collaborative from the ground up, the authors advocate for input at every stage, from the design of research questions to where findings are published. Drawing on philosopher Donna Haraway’s concept of making “oddkin,” they urge unexpected collaborations across disciplines. Social-cultural anthropologists, despite more than 150 years of studying kinship in living societies, are still rarely included in ancient DNA conversations.

Genetics can reveal one thread of the story of how ancient people were connected. Mistaking that thread for the whole fabric is, the authors argue, where the real trouble begins.

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