78 ancient Korean genomes reveal Silla consanguineous marriage
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- Researchers performed genome-wide analysis on 78 skeletons from the Imdang-Joyeong burial site in Gyeongsan, southeast Korean Peninsula, dating to the ~1,500-year-old Silla Kingdom.
- The team identified 11 first-degree, 23 second-degree, and 20 third-or-more-distant relative pairs among the buried individuals, revealing a dense kinship network at the site.
- Five individuals showed long runs of homozygosity indicating their parents were closely related, demonstrating consanguineous marriage occurred among both elite grave owners and sacrificial victims.
- Grave owners and sacrificial victims showed no major genetic differences, though they never shared biological kinship closer than third degree, per the study published in Science Advances by Hyoungmin Moon et al.
- Unlike many ancient European societies where women moved to join their husbands' groups, women in Imdang-Joyeong were often buried near their biological kin — a social pattern the authors link to the prevalence of close-kin marriage.
- DNA was extracted from teeth and petrous bones (inner ear bones), and the team compared single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to map biological relationships across the site.
Why it matters: The 78 genomes represent one of the largest ancient DNA datasets from a single East Asian Three Kingdoms site, giving researchers a rare window into Silla social organization. The finding that women remained buried near their birth families directly contradicts the patrilocal patterns seen across much of ancient Europe, reshaping assumptions about marriage and residence customs in early Korean society.
