Abstract
Archaeogenomic research has proven to be a valuable tool to trace migrations of historic and
prehistoric individuals and groups, whereas relationships within a group or burial site have
not been investigated to a large extent. Knowing the genetic kinship of historic and prehistoric
individuals would give important insights into social structures of ancient and historic cultures.
Most archaeogenetic research concerning kinship has been restricted to uniparental
markers, while studies using genome-wide information were mainly focused on comparisons
between populations. Applications which infer the degree of relationship based on modernday
DNA information typically require diploid genotype data. Low concentration of endogenous
DNA, fragmentation and other post-mortem damage to ancient DNA (aDNA) makes
the application of such tools unfeasible for most archaeological samples. To infer family relationships
for degraded samples, we developed the software READ (Relationship Estimation
from Ancient DNA). We show that our heuristic approach can successfully infer up to second
degree relationships with as little as 0.1x shotgun coverage per genome for pairs of individuals.
We uncover previously unknown relationships among prehistoric individuals by applying
READ to published aDNA data from several human remains excavated from different cultural
contexts. In particular, we find a group of five closely related males from the same Corded
Ware culture site in modern-day Germany, suggesting patrilocality, which highlights the possibility
to uncover social structures of ancient populations by applying READ to genome-wide
aDNA data. READ is publicly available from https://bitbucket.org/tguenther/read.