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Scottish Beakers: Was missing body a Dutchman in Scotland?
News has been released of some remarkable pots excavated in 2005 near Kilmartin, Argyll & Bute. They date from over 4,000 years ago, and suggest Scottish contact with Holland, Ireland and Yorkshire in the copper and early bronze ages. The pots, which had been buried in graves, are the latest finds in a large complex of burials and ritual structures excavated at Upper Largie in advance of gravel quarrying over the past 25 years.
The larger of two graves contained three Beakers, a type of ceramic found across much of north, west and central Europe. It is very rare to find more than one pot at once, but the style of these adds to their interest: they are of early, international type (known technically as epi-maritime, cordzoned-maritime and all-over-cord respectively), whose closest parallels are from the Netherlands; charcoal radiocarbon dated to 2570–2280BC confirms this early dating.
3 comments:
Will the DNA testing determine mother/daughter relationships? In other words discover incest? Father/daughter, father's brother is father of his daughter's child etc?
Sure. Test enough markers in the right people and you will be able to determine the biological relationships between them with near certainty.
As pointed out in the link, things can get more confusing when trying, for example, to determine which of two brothers fathered a child, but at most this just means you need to test more markers.
Supposedly, the testing is only to establish the children's maternity/paternity. In theory, particularly with that many closely-related people tested, it should be possible to reconstruct deeper pedigrees.
Nice site on paternity testing / DNA profiling, with sample data (13 CODIS STRs) for a 3 generation pedigree.
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