Humans

Kin twist for early farmers
Early farmers may have redefined the notion of kin by burying social allies, not biological relatives, in mud brick houses. Dental analyses of 266 people buried under the floors of dwellings at Çatalhöyük, a Turkish site inhabited from 9,000 to 7,400 years ago, indicate that deceased family members were rarely interred together, say anthropologists Marin Pilloud of Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii and Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus.