DNA rewrites medieval Sweden mystery: Children were often buried with unrelated adults

Shared medieval graves in Sweden have often been interpreted as family burials, especially when an adult and a child were interred together.

DNA evidence now suggests that this was frequently the wrong assumption.

Rather than simple family groupings, these burials point to a more layered story about kinship, religion, and community in early Christian Scandinavia.

What's happening?

To examine who was actually being buried together, researchers studied DNA from 142 skeletons recovered from three Swedish cemeteries used between the 10th and 14th centuries, focusing on graves that contained multiple individuals.

As Live Science reported, the results overturned a longstanding idea about the connections between those buried in the same grave.

In a statement, Maja Krzewińska, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University and the study's first author, said: "We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members. In most cases, that was not what we found."

Many of the shared graves joined an adult and a child, and those pairings were often same-sex, such as a woman with a girl or a man with a boy.

Even so, genetic testing seldom showed that they were close biological relatives.

The study also points to the influence of Christianity, which spread through Scandinavia in the late 10th century and brought more standardized burial customs, including east-west grave orientation, simple shrouds, and limits on who could be buried in consecrated ground.

Why does it matter?

These findings show that shared burial was not a reliable sign of immediate family.

When an adult and a child were buried together, the relationship was not necessarily that of parent and child. In some cases, it may instead have reflected social, religious, or household ties.

The findings also offer insight into how early Christian communities functioned in practice.

In early medieval Scandinavia, households could include extended relatives, servants, employees, and enslaved individuals.

Burial decisions may have been shaped as much by community membership as by bloodlines.

The research also raises the possibility that some children buried with adults were unbaptized and otherwise would have been excluded from formal cemetery burial.

Krzewińska told Live Science in an email, "We have previously analyzed a burial containing an adult and the remains of a fetus, which we believe represents an unbaptized individual."

Ideas about family, belonging, and care can leave traces that are not always visible until new tools bring them to light.

What's being done?

Ancient DNA is giving archaeologists a way to revisit questions that traditional archaeology could only approach indirectly through grave layout, artifacts, and skeleton placement. This study shows how genetics can directly test those earlier interpretations.

The same research that found unrelated people buried together also identified family lines extending across several generations within the same cemetery.

At Västerhus, the team connected a woman known as Lady 56, a Christian pilgrim buried with a scallop shell linked to Santiago de Compostela, to relatives buried elsewhere in the cemetery over three generations.

Krzewińska said, "We also believe, based on more distant genetic affinity, that some co-burials represent more distant family relations, or even non-biological kin group relations."

Future research will likely move beyond the simple question of immediate family and instead explore broader social networks, including extended kin groups, household structures, and religious identity.

"Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time," study co-author Anna Kjellström, an archaeologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement. "Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly."

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