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In 2020, archaeologists in Ireland first announced a startling find at Newgrange, a giant Neolithic burial chamber 30 miles north of Dublin. Genetic analysis of the 5,000-year-old human skull fragments indicated that the man was the product of an incestuous relationship, either between siblings or a parent and their own child.
Experts offered a headline-grabbing theory: Neolithic Ireland was ruled by incestuous royal dynasties, or potentially even “god-kings” similar to those documented in ancient Egyptian and Incan empires. Dating back roughly 500 years before both Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids), the UNESCO World Heritage Site contains the remains of numerous Stone Age individuals. Combined with evidence of genetic relations in other passage tombs on the island, according to another team led by researchers at the University College Dublin, the Newgrange god-king hypothesis doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny. Their argument is laid out in a study published on June 22 in the journal Antiquity.
The mystery of NG10
Constructed around 3100 BCE, Newgrange includes a massive burial mound built from an estimated 196,000 tons of layered earth and stone. The site has featured prominently in Irish culture for millennia, with folklore eventually ascribing the chambers as home to the region’s chief god Dagda and his son Aengus. Antiquarians first rediscovered Newgrange in 1699 CE, but the most thorough excavation work at the site began in 1962. Experts have continued exploring the Stone Age trove—including the controversial skull fragment known as NG10.
Dating between 3340 and 3020 BCE, NG10 potentially offered, “far-reaching consequences for our understanding of prehistoric population movement and the structure of that ancient society,” according to the 2020 study’s accompanying report in Nature.
“Socially sanctioned matings of this nature are very rare, and are documented almost exclusively among politico-religious elites—specifically within polygynous and patrilineal royal families that are headed by god-kings,” the authors noted at the time.
Contradicting theories
Archeologist Jessica Smyth disagrees. As one of the latest study’s co-authors and an associate professor at University College Dublin, Smyth has serious doubts about NG10’s royal pedigree.
“People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs—the whole community does not end up in these monuments,” Smyth explained in a statement. “However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.”
Smyth and her colleagues argue that many of the site’s other skeletal remains simply don’t support the idea of pervasive incest among those buried at Newgrange. Instead, they say the genetic clustering found amid bones in specific passage tombs more typically reflects distant biological relations such as second cousins and even great-great-great-grand parents. With this knowledge, Smyth and co-authors believe the burials weren’t solely determined by lineage or royal dynasty, but potentially along more communal, egalitarian lines.
“We now have some really great examples of monuments elsewhere in Europe that contain people with very close biological ties—parents, children, grandparents, etc.,” said Smyth. “This sort of [ancient DNA] evidence is much closer to the idea of a lineage or dynasty. [But] we do not see this evidence in Irish passage tombs.”
What’s more, a deceased person’s remains were treated differently during Neolithic Ireland than they are today.
“Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period. Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities,” added Smyth.
‘A one-off example’
Until recently, archaeologists have largely examined Irish megaliths and their passage tombs individually from each other, instead of in a broader context of the communities that surrounded them. Taken altogether, the team believes it remains difficult to extrapolate dynastic dynamics from a single skull fragment.
“A one-off example of incest is a shaky foundation on which to reconstruct an elite, let alone a specific social [hierarchy],” the study authors contend, adding that doing so may incorrectly further the myth that only important males were socially relevant.
“[It] doesn’t make sense to continue to focus so exclusively on forms of stable, individual rule, in Neolithic Ireland and elsewhere, when the evidence is insufficient to support such claims,” they wrote. “It downplays the contribution made by collective action in the prehistoric past.”
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