Avar family trees show widows taken by their husband's son or brother, and one male line that vanished from its own cemetery

In April 2024 a team led by Zuzana Hofmanová and Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone published genomes of 424 people from four fully excavated Avar cemeteries in Nature. About 300 had a parent, child or sibling in the same cemetery. The largest family tree runs nine generations over about 250 years. Every father in the Rákóczifalva trees descended from a founding man. The trees contain 102 sons and 20 daughters; only one daughter had a child buried there. The mothers all came from outside. In several cases closely related men had children with the same woman: three pairs of father and son, two pairs of full brothers, a pair of half-brothers, and an uncle and nephew. The authors read these as levirate unions, a widow taken by her husband's kin. One woman, RKF140, had four partners from two family lines in two levirate unions. One man had four partners. No couple was closely related, which shows the Avars tracked ancestry for generations. Founding men were buried with horse harnesses and belt sets. In the middle Avar period one male line replaced another at Rákóczifalva. In the last generation of the old line, 12 related men are buried; only three have children at the site. The skeletons show no wounds. New families brought wooden grave chambers, and burial with a horse harness stopped. The authors link the change to local political realignment. Ancestry did not change, so only the family trees reveal it.