Did Inbreeding Bind Early Farmers Together?

摘要

About 10,000 years ago, roving hunter-gatherers in the Near East began settling down to form farming villages. What were the social ties that bound them into communities? A German team working at the 9500-year-old early farming site of Basta in Jordan has one answer: The inhabitants apparently engaged in inbreeding, although not necessarily incest.The evidence for this startling conclusion, reported online last week in PLOS ONE, comes from a rare genetic anomaly in which both incisors are missing from the upper jaw. The incidence ranges from 0.5% to 3.0% in today's human populations, but it was 35.7% in 28 buried skeletons with preserved upper jaws. Even in groups known from their genealogy to have engaged in intensive inbreeding, this proportion never exceeds 20%, the team notes.