by Martin Jones
A mother, father, and their two children dying together and buried in itself does not cause too many waves, but, when publishing the work, Wolfgang Haak and his colleagues felt confident they had made a quite a discovery. They argued they had assembled the oldest uncontested evidence in the world for a nuclear family.
Much that is familiar in in the modern western world has a more recent history than it first seems. The family model of a couple with its immediate children is only one of many ways the domestic unit may be organized, and a number of scholars have argued for a very recent date. Friedrich Engels associated its appearance with the age of industrialization, and the depopulation of larger, extended families from the agrarian landscape to equip the newly emerging factories. Alan MacFarlane is among the scholars who have used earlier texts to challenge that chronology. They have argued that the small, two generation nuclear family goes back at least to the middle ages. Haak’s evidence is taking that back further still, till the end of the Neolithic.
The earliest Neolithic farmers in Central and Northern Europe inhabited the kind of longhouse that would seem to lend itself better to some sort of extended family group, and Europe’s earliest burial monuments have a collective nature that point to larger groupings. It might be quite reasonable to see the nuclear family emerging at the end of the Neolithic period at such places as Eulau, as a prelude to the individual accumulation of wealth that characterizes the subsequent Bronze Age, a narrative resonating with that of Engels, but occupying a much deeper episode of the past. However that picture may not be the final one.
The Eulau nuclear family was ‘patrilocal’, the woman moved to her intended husband’s location, and by implication to his family’s farm. That is a key feature in the economic dimension of the nuclear family, it’s facilitation of the accumulation of land and wealth within the male line. Earlier anthropologists posited a general trend in history from matrilocality to patrilocality, and from collective life to differentiation in status and wealth. So it interesting to note that patrilocality can be pushed further back into the European Neolithic by some of the methods employed at Eulau.
Alex Bentley analysed the strontium isotopes in teeth of over three hundred skeletons from the very first group of farmers to spread across the European interior. These included skeletons from the earliest known Linear Bandkeramic cemetery at Vedrovice in the Czech Republic. This large group comprised roughly similar numbers of males and females, each of whose strontium isotope balance could be measured, and from it, the distance between place of childhood and place of death inferred. The data was clear; from the earliest Neolithic of the European interior, women moved greater distances than men. Patrilocality seems to have been the norm. This doesn’t necessarily mean they were also nuclear; it more indicates that we have only just started to empirically explore the social dynamics of the family through time, a field of enormous potential for biomolecular archaeology.
This separate enquiry is not entirely removed from that of the celebrated kings of biomolecular archaeology. Tutankhamun, Louis XVI, Czar Nicholas, and Richard are all in essence extreme manifestations of the dynamics of the patrilocal nuclear family, and its considerable potential for accumulation of wealth and power within the male line. The violent deaths that a number of those royal celebrities share with the anonymous Eulau family allude to the same coercion by violence that on repeated occasions has been use either to police and protect the accumulation of wealth and power, or to challenge it.
If Wolfgang Haak has actually encountered a key moment in a Late Neolithic establishment of this social norm, then it seems reasonable to draw connections with a subsequent Bronze Age characterized by individuals buried with material wealth, a significant part of which is in the form of weaponry. The various Royal families explored through molecular methods also demonstrate many ways in which the patrilocal nuclear family and its resources may be manipulated and sustained, for example, through the marriage of close relatives and the legitimation of ‘extra offspring’. At another of the Eulau burials, we may see an example of that manipulation in action.
Haak’s burial of four individuals was something of an ideal nuclear family, the the genetics and the isotopic sourcing coming together to identify a local man, a woman who joined him from elsewhere, and their two sons. After the violent event that ended all their lives, people who knew them took care to arrange them in their grave facing each other, with grave goods selected to mark the parents, the overall arrangement affirming the family they comprised. A second grave that Haak examined is similar in several respects. There is again a male and an adult female with grave goods, and two juveniles without. The male with grave goods is also a juvenile, perhaps seven to nine years old. Could it be that in the absence of a father he had to adopt a role above his years? However, neither is the woman their mother; her mitochondrial DNA is distinct. Whoever chose to place the bodies in the ground with such care chose to override the precise details of biological relatedness, and acknowledge this family group in much the same manner as any other family group, at the time of their passing.
Turi King’s genetic analysis of Richard III had rather politely taken note of evidence for false paternity in the royal bloodline. For kings and peasants alike, the nuclear family is an ideal, something to be negotiated and connected to the complexities of real life. Adoption, substitution, and post hoc legitimation are strategies that can bend that ideal to real needs and aspirations. Now that we have a new range of methods to probe into the past, we can attempt to detect and define the domestic institutions of past societies, and look not just for their origins, but also at how they were negotiated, amended, and refashioned.
10
enemies within
ways of the flesh
Maria of Aragon was a woman of substance in Renaissance Italy. As Marchioness of Vasto and a personal friend of Michelangelo, her social status during life earned her in death a place in the Abbey of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. After four centuries in the abbey, her body was disinterred. Gino Fornacieri, a palaeopathologist at Pisa University, had gained permission to analyse her mummified remains. Having noticed signs of disease on the body, he in due course dispatched samples to Franco Rollo at Camarino University. Rollo had been applying the new DNA techniques to a variety of unusual ancient tissues, and so was the obvious person to check out Fornacieri’s diagnosis. The samples included part of a linen patch, filled with ivy leaves, that had been found on the Marchioness’s left arm. On the skin beneath the patch an oval ulcer was still visible. With his scalpel Rollo carefully eased off some cellular tissue, and began his search for traces of ancient DNA. What he found allowed him to confirm Fornacieri’s diagnosis of Treponema pallidum, the agent of venereal syphilis. Yet another black box in the archaeological record had been prised open by molecular analysis. Ancient DNA would open the way to study a range of hitherto invisible diseases and their pathogens.
The woman’s body leaves much to the archaeological record, while the syphilis bacterium is as difficult for us to see as it was for her. Yet both organisms contain a genetic blueprint that can be amplified to a similar volume. As well as enriching our understanding of organisms from the archaeological record that we can see with the naked eye, the molecular signal can be as strong for something microscopic as it can be for a large mammal. As Rollo’s work was demonstrating, molecular techniques could bring into view the whole range of organisms involved in past human life, whatever their scale.
In working with the bacterial genome of syphilis, Rollo was dealing with a looped DNA molecule not dissimilar from those within the mitochondrion and chloroplast. Indeed, it is now believed that those sub-cellular structures first arrived in ancient plant and animal cells by the invasion of something rather like a bacterium. Like the genomes of those cellular bodies, most of the syphilis genome is contained within a circular DNA molecule, but a rather larger circle. It is about ten times the size of the chloroplast genome, and about 100 times as long as the human mitochon
drial genome, and it contains a few thousand genes. Other bacterial genomes have varied forms. Some are doubly and triply coiled about themselves in order to pack into tiny cells. They also have variable regions in common, which can be used for identification and phylogenetic analysis.
The recognition of these bacterial genomes has largely relied upon a gene involved in building ribosomal RNA, known as the 16S rRNA gene. Something rather similar is found in the mammalian mitochondrion, where it serves as a useful molecular clock. All organisms need such a gene, as part of their RNA equipment, and the 16S is simply a way of describing the physical size of the gene. Within bacteria, this gene varies in sequence structure and serves as a useful identifier and evolutionary clock for bacteria. Using this gene to identify what else was in the dressing, Rollo encountered a range of other bacteria normally found living inside our mouths, part of the natural wildlife of our saliva. The Marchioness had had her ailment treated by what contemporary doctors described as ‘salivation cures’ for the morbus gallicus.
Retrieving such a detailed medical history for a named public figure from the past has its own slightly troubling allure, but getting to grips with the range of micro-organisms involved in the human past has a much larger, less anecdotal significance. We know surprisingly little about patterns of human health in the very long term.
We can say a lot about changes in health and medicine during the last 200 years, and to some extent as far back in time as the ancient Greeks. The earliest 99 percent of our species’ history is, however, far more open to conjecture. It is clear that in recent times scientific medicine has eradicated or minimized certain diseases, and reduced mortality at certain key points in life, in particular during childbirth and the first few years of childhood. We can also contrast a period of improving health in the modern period with the horrors of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. There is growing evidence of something in the sixth century AD rather similar to the Black Death, and known as the Justinian Plague. Beyond that, we are heavily dependent on what we can glean from ancient skeletons, and they are open to contrasting interpretations.
One view would have the improvements of recent history as the summation of an extended period of progress, in step with the overall progress of human history. This view sees the progress in knowledge and invention as increasingly buffering us from the worst that nature can offer. A converse view would see the historical records of pre-twentieth-century health as the end point of a long period of decline. That decline is seen as following our Neolithic deviation from nature, and our propensity to crowd large numbers of stressed and undernourished people and livestock into compact permanent settlements. The more extreme that deviation, the more of a breeding ground we ourselves became for opportunistic micro-organisms.
Conventional archaeological evidence does not easily discriminate between these two views of the past. Prior to the twentieth century, human populations of a variety of periods and places yield evidence of the high levels of infant mortality from which modern medicine has released some modern populations. However, many of those who survived beyond childhood stood a good chance of reaching three score years and ten with a good set of teeth. The low life expectancies computed from ancient population evidence are a consequence of including infant mortality in the global average. The skeletal evidence itself leaves many questions about long-term trends in health unanswered.
This uncertainty about our past has implications that go beyond the actual experience of sickness and health. Micro-organisms are our principal predators, the next step up in our food chain. The dynamics of our population patterns through time are as much bound up with the micro-organisms that eat us as they are with the species available for us to consume. Nothing illustrates this better than the cyclical repetition of epidemics, or the pandemic that came to be known as the Black Death. Between the years 1347 and 1351, this voracious pandemic reduced the population of Europe by a third, and precipitated a population decline sustained long after the disease itself had subsided. The much more fragmentary evidence from the earlier Justinian Plague suggests that this too could have been a sustained and pernicious killer.
These two pandemic diseases clearly had a profound impact on life, death, and the sheer scale of the human population of Europe over the last 2,000 years. As a consequence, the pattern of population growth for the two millennia preceding the Industrial Revolution looked very different from what we have seen since. Early historical Europe underwent, not the unstoppable rise of industrial populations, but long, slow cycles of growth, disease and decline. Looking further back beyond the written record, we have two models from which to choose. One model treats what we see today as the norm, albeit on a different scale. Human population has an innate tendency to grow exponentially, particularly since the beginnings of agriculture. The disease episodes are particular events lodged in particular histories of urban squalor. This is the model that implicitly underpins the concept, discussed in Chapter 7, of a number of expansions and journeys. The alternative model treats modern growth as an exception, an artefact of industrial societies. The prolonged mediaeval oscillation of a human population, caught between its prey and its micro-predators, provides a better fit for settled farming communities in prehistory.
Without knowing what the dynamics of our micro-predators are through time, we have no reason to assume they are more like the exponential rise of recent centuries than the drawn-out oscillations discerned from late prehistory onwards. We need to know whether the Justinian Plague and Black Death are unique to the period of documented history. Are they features of dense, urbanized societies only, or is the long saga of human prehistory peppered with surges of micro-predation, repeatedly curbing populations? The archaeological record is fairly silent on the matter. Even though we can look at ancient skeletons, examine their teeth and bones, assess their life-spans, and sometimes encounter bones that are clearly diseased, the archaeological record gives us no easy answers. It does not help us discriminate between these two stories. We can see why, when we take a closer look at one of the more meticulously studied cemetery assemblages from the time of the Black Death.
life and death in mediaeval york
On the outskirts of the City of York in northern England, the ruined church of Helen-on-the-Walls was fully excavated in advance of a housing development. Also unearthed were the bodies of well over 1,000 of the parishioners who attended the church between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. We know a great deal about that mediaeval population of this parish of York, thanks to the scientific analyses undertaken by the archaeologists. They revealed that life was hard, with one in four of the parishioners dying in childhood, and with women of childbearing age also vulnerable. Only one in ten of either sex reached the age of sixty. We can infer how long men and women could expect to live, how well they were fed, the extent to which their working lives made their bones ache, and so on. We can also say something about their health. One had bone lesions resulting from syphilis; tuberculosis had collapsed the spine of another. Many of the remaining skeletons displayed symptoms of arthritis, but in general their health did not appear to be at all bad.
That is quite an interesting comment bearing in mind the dates of the burials. They span that period of the later fourteenth century when a third of all people in Europe died as a result of the cyclical resurgence of a rat-borne bacterium called Yersinia pestis. York suffered the Black Death with the rest of Europe. The parishioners of St Helen’s were presumably not exempt, and yet an intensive study of the bones of 1,000 of those parishioners revealed not a trace of the killer disease. The reason is simple. The faster a disease kills, the less trace it leaves on the bones. For a disease to show up on our skeletons, we have to stay alive long enough for the bones to suffer visibly. For the spine of a tuberculosis victim to collapse, for the skull of a syphilitic to become riddled with lesions, for the facial bones of a leper to erode away, life must go on. The main disease we see in archaeological skeletons is arthritis, the wear and tear o
n the joints, which may give considerable discomfort and pain, but which generally allows the sufferer to survive for many years. In terms of archaeological evidence, fast killers like the Black Death fall into a large black hole.
If these skeletons bear no mark of the greatest trauma of contemporary mediaeval life, how many other prolonged plagues and pandemics have remained invisible before written records? The Black Death is an unusual episode, but we know from accounts of the Justinian Plague that it is not unique. As with the Black Death, contemporary records document the devastation of the Justinian Plague. However, the innumerable bones from the many late Roman graveyards retain no discernible trace of the disease.
The first steps to greater knowledge have now been taken by molecular archaeology, not to seek out symptoms on a blemish-free skeleton, but to find the disease itself. Just as Franco Rollo had sought out the DNA fingerprint of the syphilis bacterium in a sixteenth-century Marchioness, Michel Drancourt and his colleagues at Marseilles embarked upon a similar search. They were looking for the plague bacterium at the heart of the Black Death, Yersinia pestis.
A starting point for the studies of Drancourt’s team was to find some skeletons with a clear association with the plague bacterium. These they found at two mass graves in Provence, France, which documentary evidence had linked to plague quarantine hospitals. At Lambesc, 133 corpses had been placed in such a pit in 1590, and at Marseilles, 200 bodies had been buried in a single month in 1722. They selected the jaws of six of these and, in order to minimize the chance of DNA contamination, worked with the internal dental pulp of unerupted teeth, probably the part of the skeleton best protected from the outside environment. Powdery remnants of the pulp were scraped out and subjected to PCR using primers specifically designed for Yersinia pestis. For comparison, seven other skeletons were similarly sampled, this time from a mediaeval graveyard in Toulon, with no specific documentary connection with plague. None of these Toulon samples produced a PCR product, whereas three of the six plague-pit specimens did. For the first time, ancient plague had been confronted in the archaeological record.
