Bloodlines in the barrows

Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments: What the Kinship Test Found

After my posts (https://www.sarsen.org/2026/09/borrowed-tombs-or-ozymandias-in-wessex.html and  https://www.sarsen.org/2026/08/a-stranger-in-family-grave.html) on Vuković et al. 2026, a query arose that the paper's main text doesn't answer. Did the study test whether the people buried at each site were related to each other, especially the three infants buried together in the Fir Tree Field pond barrow? And what exactly were the Monkton four: all siblings, or a mother and three children? The genetics finds two boys among the children, where the bones suggested one. Children can't be reliably sexed from the skeleton, so this is a correction rather than a surprise.

The main text only has room for Monkton. The answers are in the supplement. The kinship test found one first-degree family, one third-degree pair, and no link across the gap at the three reused monuments. The triple infant burial turns out to be the most surprising result of all. Figures are from Table 1 and Supplementary Data Files 9 and 10, unless noted.

How the test was run

READv2 was run on pairs, with the Neolithic individuals kept apart from the later ones so the baseline is not mixed. A first-degree pair is a parent and child, or full siblings. The authors specify a pair as siblings only where the overlap is at least 40,000 markers. Lower pairs are printed and not used for that call. The Neolithic pairs are Supplementary Data File 9. The later pairs are Data File 10. There is no published pair that joins an early burial to a later burial at the same site.

Monkton-up-Wimborne

Four people in one oval grave, dates overlapping 3364–3093 BC. The main text treats two arrangements as the most parsimonious: all four full siblings, or a mother of 30–45 with three children of about 5, 9 and 10. The site note says a woman of about 30, two girls of 5–10 and a boy of about 9. Genetic sex does not match that reading of the bones. Table 1 has two males and two females.

ID	Skeleton	Date (95.4%)	Coverage	Sex	mtDNA	Y
muw002	F23B	3364–3101	0.34×	XY	K1a+195	I2a2a
muw003	F23C	3363–3101	0.11×	XX	K1a	–
muw001	F23A	3357–3093	0.78×	XY	K1a+195	I2a2a1a1a2
muw004	F23D	3340–3096	0.41×	XX	K1a+195	–

All six pairs are called first degree. Two clear the 40,000-marker line, and both are called full siblings: muw001–muw002 (42,708 markers, kinship 0.24) and muw001–muw004 (49,696, kinship 0.25). The other four are first degree on less data, and the supplement will not say sibling rather than parent for those.

Pair	Markers	Call	Kinship
001–004	49,696	First degree, siblings	0.25
001–002	42,708	First degree, siblings	0.24
002–004	27,645	First degree	0.24
001–003	15,849	First degree	0.26
003–004	10,282	First degree	0.21
002–003	8,788	First degree	0.25

So muw001, muw002 and muw004 are one generation. muw001 and muw002 share I2a2a; muw001 is called to a finer branch. Three of the four are K1a+195. muw003 is called only K1a, on the lowest coverage and the lowest mitochondrial coverage (7.25×, against 37–107× for the others). That is a shallower call, not a second maternal line. The paper's statement is that all four lie within K1a.

muw003 is in every pair below 16,000 markers. She is the person the test cannot place. If she is the adult woman, a mother and three children fits, and the three children are already the sibling set. If the adult is muw004, the test has already called her a full sibling of muw001, so she is an older sister, and muw003 is another sibling rather than the mother. The sample list is F23A = muw001, F23B = muw002, F23C = muw003, F23D = muw004. Which of those four skeletons is the adult is not in the paper. That is the only fact still needed.

The later man is not in that test. muw005, 1519–1321 BC, coverage 0.14×, is male, mitochondrial haplogroup H, Y-haplogroup R1b1a1a2. No READv2 pair links him to the four. The runs were split by period. The paper calls him unrelated on ancestry, not on a kinship coefficient. He was laid on the surface of the partly silted central pit, not in the family's grave, and covered with a small flint cairn. His mitochondrial haplogroup is not theirs, and neither is his Y line.

Fir Tree Field pond barrow

Fourteen centuries later and not far away, on the same stretch of Cranborne Chase, the question is reversed. At Monkton the bones suggested a family and the genetics confirmed it. At Fir Tree Field a triple burial of infants looks like a family, and the genetics says otherwise.

Five individuals, all Early Bronze Age. The site note identifies four of them. F14a, F14b and F14d are the three infant inhumations in F14. F6 is a separate infant, 18 months to 2 years, extended, with a Food Vessel. F27 is in the sample list and not in that note.

ID	Feature	Who	Date (95.4%)	Sex	mtDNA	Y
dfb004	F14d	Infant	2008–1748	XY	U5b2a4	R1b1a1a2a1a2
dfb002	F6	Infant, 18 months–2 years	1955–1781	XY	I1a1	R1b1a1a2a1a2
dfb005	F27	Not described in the site note	1920–1769	XX	U5b2a1a2	–
dfb003	F14b	Infant	1886–1750	XY	T2b2b	R1b1a1a2
dfb001	F14a	Infant	1882–1745	XY	H1b	R1b1a1a2

The five mitochondrial haplogroups are five different ones. That excludes a mother and child, and siblings through the mother, among these five. The three in F14 are unrelated to each other: kinship 0.01 (F14a–F14b, 21,445 markers), 0.02 (F14a–F14d, 20,579) and 0.03 (F14b–F14d, 25,940), against about 0.25 for a first-degree pair. A brother or a parent inside the triple would have shown. One was called at Monkton on fewer markers than any of these.

The relationship that was reported is not inside the triple. dfb002 (F6) and dfb004 (F14d) are third degree: 39,862 markers, kinship 0.06. Same Y-line, R1b1a1a2a1a2, and different mitochondrial haplogroups, I1a1 and U5b2a4. The supplement calls it a distant paternal relative. Between two infants, third degree most simply means first cousins, children of two brothers, though the test cannot say which third-degree relationship it is. The authors treat it as one of the two post-Neolithic results that clear their reporting line. The other is not a relative: cfa001 and a previously published Canada Farm individual are the same person sampled twice.

The other two boys in F14 are called only to R1b1a1a2, the clade above that longer type. That can be as far as their data go. It is not a second reported relationship. F27 is unrelated to the other four on the pairs that could be read. She is the one individual in the barrow without a described context: female, dated with the others, with ordinary Bronze Age ancestry, but not in the site note, so her age, grave and position are unknown here. Her mitochondrial haplogroup, U5b2a1a2, sits on the same U5b2 branch as the F14d infant's U5b2a4, but on a different twig. That shared maternal ancestry lies far too deep to count as family.

Across the gap

Which leaves the question the paper was built around. At the three monuments where a later burial sits in an older one, the later person does not share a mitochondrial haplogroup with anyone earlier sampled there.

Site	Earlier	Later
Monkton-up-Wimborne	Four, all within K1a, 3364–3093 BC	muw005, H, 1519–1321 BC
Sisters Long Barrow	K1a4a1b, J1c3, H4a1a1, 3888–3527 BC	slb016, H1ak1, 1534–1436 BC
Sale's Lot	lot005, K1b1a1, 3946–3654 BC	lot001, H6a1b, 2622–2467 BC

No READv2 pair was published between the early and late individuals at these sites. A first-degree link across those gaps was not a plausible thing to find, and was not tested in the published runs. A maternal line from the particular people sampled is ruled out by the haplogroups. A paternal line is ruled out only at Monkton, where both the early boys and the later man have Y data and they differ (I2a2a against R1b). At Sisters and Sale's Lot the later burials are women, so there is no Y line to compare. Descent from Neolithic Britain in general is a question for the ancestry models, and for my earlier post.

Within the whole set, the only kinship READv2 reports between different people is the Monkton cluster and the one third-degree pair at Fir Tree Field. Everywhere else the within-site pairs are unrelated, or the overlap was left unused.

What it adds up to

So, to answer the query: they did look. The kinship test was run on everyone with enough data, and it simply found very little. At Monkton it found the family everyone expected, and it is one fact away from saying which family. If the adult woman is F23C, she is the mother of three full siblings. If she is F23D, all four are siblings. Someone with the skeletons can settle that.

At Fir Tree Field it found something nobody expected. The three infants laid together in F14 were not brothers, and not close kin at all. Whatever put them in one grave, whether a shared death, a shared season or a shared rite, it was not close family. The one family thread in the barrow runs between graves instead: the infant in F6 and one of the F14 three were cousins, or something like it, through their fathers. The pond barrow held a lineage, loosely, but not a household.

And across the gap, nothing, which is what anyone should have expected. Kinship tests find parents, siblings and cousins. They cannot bridge twelve centuries, let alone twenty-two. The strangers in the old graves were not the builders' grandchildren. Whether they were, in some remote and untraceable way, their descendants is a question kinship tests cannot answer.

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Vuković, N. et al. (2026). Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain. Scientific Reports 16:26819. doi:10.1038/s41598-026-66094-z. Table 1; p. 6; site notes for Monkton-up-Wimborne and Fir Tree Field pond barrow; Supplementary Data Files 9 and 10. The position of muw005 on the surface of the infill is from the excavator's account.