Austin, Texas—according to the A biology The report, DNA samples were taken from 85 Scythians who lived in Central Asia during the Iron Age between about 900 and 200 BCThe analysis was conducted by Ashin Galichi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Ainash Childebayeva of the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues. The remains of 38 of the Scythians were recovered from kurgans that also contained distinctive weapons and gold artefacts, while another 47 were recovered from smaller kurgans that lacked gold grave goods. The study determined that elite Scythians were 11 times more likely to be related to each other than to other Scythians. Among the elite remains were identified two pairs of brothers, a brother and a sister, a parent and a child, and two pairs of grandfather and grandson. The two brothers were buried in different places, as were the grandfather and grandson. Their graves were also found closer to each other than those of non-elite. “It is possible that this indicates some degree of geographic centralization of elite burials that are, on average, closer to each other,” Childebayeva said. “Almost half of the unique individuals in our dataset were female, indicating that women had high social status in Iron Age Scythian society,” Galichi said. Read the original scholarly article about this research science advancement. For more information, visit “Origin of the Scythians” one of AarcheologyTop 10 discoveries of 2024.
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