Similar burial rites, different kinship systems in the Copper Age of the Great Hungarian Plain

25.06.2025.

An international research team, including our MTA-ELTE Lendület “Momentum” Innovation Research Group, has proven population continuity on the Great Hungarian Plain at the beginning of the Copper Age, an era characterised by radical changes. The the most modern genetic analyses were applied, which showed that nearby communities with similar material culture and burial customs developed fundamentally different kinship systems in the second half of the 5th millennium cal BCE. It was also revealed that first-cousin unions were common at one of the sites. The publication is now available in Nature Communications.

According to archaeological studies, the middle of the 5th millennium BCE saw profound changes in almost every aspect of life on the Great Hungarian Plain. The Neolithic settlement mounds, or, in other words, tells, and large settlements covering up to 60-80 hectares, were abandoned within a century and a half. These large settlements, which could be home to many thousands of people, according to demographic estimates, were replaced by a dense network of small farmsteads consisting of a few houses. This phenomenon was accompanied by the transformation of the material culture, and, for the first time in the region’s history, the appearance of isolated cemeteries.

Map of the Polgár-Csőszhalom Late Neolithic settlement (after Mesterházy et al. 2019, Fig. 7)

The research team applied the most up-to-date genetic analyses to investigate whether the occurrence of a new population can explain the Early Copper Age transformations, or, as recent archaeological studies suggested, the local population lived here continuously. Other questions included how the newly established Early Copper Age cemeteries were organised, what the biological relatedness was between those who were laid to rest next to each other, and whether there were any differences between the organisation and kinship systems of Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age communities.

The study combined population genetics, genetic relatedness analysis and IBD (Identical-By-Descent) analysis with archaeological and anthropological observations. It focused on the so-called Polgár microregion, which lies along the Tisza River, that includes the complex site of Polgár-Csőszhalom and the nearby Tiszapolgár-Basatanya Early Copper Age cemetery. The latter was then compared with the contemporaneous cemetery excavated at Urziceni-Vamă, which lies next to the Hungarian-Romanian border.

’We learned that the Late Neolithic and the Early Copper Age populations in the Polgár region were essentially continuous,’ said Anna Szécsényi-Nagy. This result supports the interpretation of the archaeological data, according to which the local community underwent a fundamental change between 4500 and 4350 cal BCE. However, there is no proof of a newcomer population in this period that could be responsible for the transformation.