Researchers: Female Family Ties Important to Social Networks

01A recent study suggests that female family ties were central to social networks in ancient Celtic society before the Roman invasion.

02Genetic evidence from a late Iron Age cemetery in Britain shows that women were closely related.

03At the same time, unrelated men were more likely to come into the community from other places, likely after marriage.

04For the study, researchers examined ancient DNA from 57 burial places in Dorset, in southwestern England.

05People used the cemetery from around 2,100 years ago to around 1,800 years ago.

06The results showed that two-thirds of the individuals descended from a single maternal lineage.

07Lara Cassidy of Trinity College, Dublin, was one of the study's co-writers.

08Cassidy suggested to the Associated Press, AP, that the results were surprising, or in her words, jaw-dropping.

09She said that such a finding had never been observed before in European prehistory.

10The study appeared recently in the scientific publication Nature.

11The research suggests that women stayed in the same circles throughout life.

12They kept social networks and likely inherited or managed land and property.

13Cassidy told the AP that the findings suggest, It's your husband who is coming in as a relative stranger, dependent on a wife's family for land and livelihood.

14Such a way of living is called matrilocality.

15The researchers said it is historically rare.

16Guido Nieky Ruscon is with the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

17Nieky Ruscon was not part of the study.

18He said researchers studying burial places in Britain and Europe have only discovered the opposite behavior.

19He said in those communities, women left their homes and families to join their husband's family group.

20He said such a way of living, known as patrilocality, has been observed in other ancient time periods.

21These include the Neolithic period, which started more than 10,000 years ago, to the early medieval period, more than 1,000 years in the past.

22Cassidy said in studies of pre-industrial societies from around 220 years ago to the present, researchers found that men joined their wives' extended family households only 8% of the time.

23But researchers already knew there was something special about the role of women in Iron Age Britain.

24A group of tribes with closely related languages and art that is often described as Celtic lived in England before the Roman invasion about 2,000 years ago.

25Valuable objects have been found buried with Celtic women.

26Roman writers, including Julius Caesar, wrote with disrespect about their relative independence and fighting abilities.

27The network of strong female family connections that the researchers found does not necessarily mean that women also held official positions of political power.

28Steady co-writer Miles Russell of Burnmouth University in England researches ancient societies.

29He said the findings do suggest that women had some control of land and property and strong social support.

30Such a situation made Britain's Celtic society more egalitarian than the Roman world, Russell said.

31I'm John Russell.