No family plots, just communal burials in ancient settlement

Owen Jarus, Livescience, 29-06-2011

Human remains discovered beneath the floors of mud-brick houses at one of the world’s first permanent settlements, were not biologically related to one another, a finding that paints a new picture of life 9,000 years ago on a marshy plain in central Turkey. Even children as young as 8 were not buried alongside their parents or other relatives at the site called Çatalhöyük, the researchers found. “It speaks a lot to the type of social structure that they might have had,” study researcher Marin Pilloud, a physical anthropologist with the United States military at Joint Accounting Command, in Hawaii, told LiveScience.

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