Ancient Celtic Elite DNA

The earliest Celtic rulers in Europe for a period of about 350 year may have been mostly from the same matrilineally inherited royal dynasty.

The early Iron Age (800 to 450 BCE) in France, Germany and Switzerland, known as the ‘West-Hallstattkreis’, stands out as featuring the earliest evidence for supra-regional organization north of the Alps. Often referred to as ‘early Celtic’, suggesting tentative connections to later cultural phenomena, its societal and population structure remain enigmatic. 

Here we present genomic and isotope data from 31 individuals from this context in southern Germany, dating between 616 and 200 BCE. We identify multiple biologically related groups spanning three elite burials as far as 100 km apart, supported by trans-regional individual mobility inferred from isotope data. These include a close biological relationship between two of the richest burial mounds of the Hallstatt culture. Bayesian modelling points to an avuncular relationship between the two individuals, which may suggest a practice of matrilineal dynastic succession in early Celtic elites. We show that their ancestry is shared on a broad geographic scale from Iberia throughout Central-Eastern Europe, undergoing a decline after the late Iron Age (450 BCE to ~50 CE).

Joscha Gretzinger et al., "Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe" Nature Human Behavior (June 3, 2024) (open access).

The paper is explored further at Bernard's Blog who notes that (per Google translate into English from French): "the results of this study suggest an avuncular society among the early Celts of the fifth or fourth century BCE era, in agreement with the historical writings of the Romans."

The Google translate in English of the French Wikipedia link to avuncular society (with minor grammatical and spelling edits) states:

The term avuncular is a technical term used, in the anthropology of kinship, to designate a privileged relationship between Ego, reference person, and his “maternal uncle” or, conversely, between Ego and his uterine nephew or niece.

The term avuncular itself derives from the Latin avunculus, a kinship term used to designate, in this language, the mother's brother (MB) as opposed to the father's brother patruus (FB). In certain societies with marked matrilineal filiation, the role which is assigned to the father in other societies can be assumed by the maternal uncle who becomes the “social father” of his sister's children. The notion of avuncular is, however, not reserved for the designation of this formula of descent (which is, moreover, rather rare) and it can also describe a formula of matrimonial alliance. The marriage of a man with his sister's daughter is thus called avuncular marriage. If the term avuncular applies to the links which unite the mother's brother and the sister's son or daughter, it can however also, in a more loose way, be used to designate the relationship between a paternal uncle and a child of his brother.

This marks a distinct shift from Bronze Age Indo-Europeans in Europe, including among the Bell Beaker people who are likely ancestral to the Celtic people, who exhibit a strict patriarchal, patrilocal clan structure.

Razib Khan also notes that the paper "makes it clear that Proto-Celtic Hallstatt southern Germany saw significant genetic change with the spread of Germanic languages from the north."