What was life like some 8,000–9,000 years ago for the people on the East Mound at Çatalhöyük, an important Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia? And what role did women hold in their society?

Corpses under the floor

The people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead directly underneath their homes. Previous studies into hereditary anatomical features of the skeletons had thrown up a surprising finding, namely that most of the people buried in a house were unrelated, while those who were most similar to one another were spread out across the whole settlement.

In other words, households appear to have been formed according to rules other than kinship. Did cultural, economic or social factors have a hand in this? Says Rosenstock, “Ever since it’s been possible to study DNA that’s this old, therefore, we’ve been using archaeogenetics to try and see how the occupants of a particular house were related.”

The two skeletons of newborns that Rosenstock’s team dug up were likewise found inside the same building, and they were not closely related either, as the study recently published in Science shows. What is more, they belonged to the same gene pool as the bodies found on the East Mound.