DNA from 142 medieval Swedes shows the people sharing a grave were rarely related

When archaeologists find an adult and a child in the same medieval grave, the reflex is to call them parent and child. A Stockholm University team led by Maja Krzewińska tested that reflex against DNA from 142 people buried in Sweden in the late Viking Age and the Middle Ages, and in most shared graves the people were not close kin. The results appeared in Science Advances on July 10, 2026, and have circulated in reposts since, including a ScienceDaily version on September 25.

Krzewińska said the usual assumption is that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family, and that in most cases the DNA showed otherwise.

Three cemeteries and 142 skeletons

The sample, described in the university’s release, came from Sigtuna near Stockholm, Västerhus in Jämtland and Fjälkinge in Skåne. It included more than 60 children and adolescents, and Archaeology Magazine’s summary puts the count at 74 adults and 68 younger people drawn from 77 graves. Medievalists.net adds that 116 of the individuals came from 50 graves holding more than one person.

The question is one of the oldest in mortuary archaeology, because a burial holding an adult woman and a small child looks like a family. Excavators have long filled in the missing relationships from appearance alone, and a cemetery’s worth of such readings can quietly shape a picture of medieval household life, of who lived with whom, who mourned whom and who was thought to belong together after death. DNA allows the assumption to be checked, and the answer given in the release is that close biological relatives were surprisingly uncommon among people placed in the same grave, even at cemeteries where high kinship could be detected elsewhere.

What the numbers looked like grave by grave

The most granular figures come from Medievalists.net’s account of the paper. At Västerhus, only 12 percent of multiple burials contained first-degree relatives, meaning a parent, child or full sibling. At Sigtuna, close kinship showed up in just 2 of 16 multiple burials. Among the 51 multiple burials the team examined for age and sex patterns, 54.9 percent held both adults and children.

Those figures do not say relatives were never buried together. Rare is the study’s word, and a minority of graves did fit the family picture.

Instead, the researchers argue that burial groupings followed social customs, religious beliefs and community rules, which puts the emphasis on how medieval communities organised their dead and away from how modern readers imagine a household. Households in medieval Scandinavia, the Medievalists.net summary notes, included extended relatives, servants and others, and biological family was described in the study as only one form of belonging.

Children buried by the rules for adult men and women

The second result concerns the children themselves. At Västerhus, men and women were normally buried in separate parts of the churchyard, and the children followed the same split: boys lay with men and most girls with women. Medievalists.net counts 17 of 28 adult-and-child graves there as same-sex pairs, so the pattern rests on a small number of graves at a single site.

News-Medical’s coverage quotes the study’s reading that gender identity was recognised early in life. Anders Götherström, a Stockholm University professor on the team, said the children were not treated as a separate category and appear to have been handled according to the same social and religious principles as adult men and women in death.

Lady 56 and the scallop shell

One grave cuts the other way. A woman labelled Lady 56 was buried at Västerhus with a scallop shell, the symbol of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a rare object in medieval Scandinavia. She died before age 30, ScienceDaily says she likely made the pilgrimage herself, and the ScienceDaily version of the release says her DNA linked her to a set of relatives buried in the same cemetery: parents, a brother and two daughters.

She matters to the argument because the method could find her family. Her relatives were scattered in the churchyard and not laid in one grave, which shows that close kin at Västerhus were recognisable in the data when they were present, so the scarcity of family groupings elsewhere is a result and not a blind spot of the technique.

The pattern’s reach beyond these three churchyards is untested, since three cemeteries and 142 people cover only a slice of the region. The paper itself is Science Advances DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeb8588. What did bring unrelated people together in a single grave, if not family, is the question the release leaves to the archaeology of each churchyard: the DNA rules out one explanation and does not supply the replacement.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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