Tomb excavation at the Joyeong burial complex in Gyeongsan, South Korea
A genomic analysis of dozens of ancient Korean skeletons has revealed a peculiar “sacrificial caste” and high inbreeding.
Around 1,500 years ago, entire families were sacrificed to honor local royalty in what is now South Korea.
This is the conclusion of a study this Wednesday in Science Advanceswhich also reveals a dense kinship system centered on women and their descendants.
The team investigated 78 skeletons from the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex in Gyeongsan, located in the southeastern region of the Korean Peninsula. The tombs in this cemetery were built between the 4th and 6th centuries, during the Three Kingdoms period (about 57 BC to 668 AD).
Historical records suggest that in the Silla kingdom, people practiced “sunjang”one form of human sacrifice in which servantsor “retainers”, were dead and buried with the local elite,.
Furthermore, it is noted that the society favored “consanguineous” marriage between related individuals.
Investigators found five individuals — both real and not real — whose parents were close relativesincluding a case of first cousins.
As detailed by , using genomic data, researchers reconstructed 13 family trees of people buried in the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex, revealing an extensive kinship network that spanned two burial sites and more than a century, centered on maternal lineages.
“The genetic relationship between individuals sacrificed over generations may suggest the presence of families that served as sacrificial individuals for the tomb-owning class during consecutive generations,” the researchers wrote in the study, cited by the same magazine.
According to the researchers, this is the first study to reveal the “distinctive family structure” of the Silla kingdom, which differs from male-centered systems found elsewhere in ancient Korea and ancient Europe.
