DNA showed the Celtic prince of Hochdorf was the uncle of the prince of Asperg, through his sister, and power passed down the mother's line

The Hochdorf grave was excavated in 1978 and 1979 under Jörg Biel. A man of about 50, roughly 180 centimetres tall, lay on a bronze couch with a gold-plated torc, a birch-bark hat, a gold-plated dagger and gold plaques on his shoes. A Greek cauldron beside him had held about 400 litres of mead. The grave dates to about 530 BC and lies within sight of the Hohenasperg, a fortified princely seat. About 10 kilometres away lies the princely grave of Asperg-Grafenbühl. In June 2024 geneticists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Baden-Württemberg heritage office published 31 genomes from these mounds in Nature Human Behaviour. The two central burials were second-degree relatives sharing the same rare maternal lineage. The team modelled every possible relationship using death dates and ages. The most likely, with 86 percent weight, was that the Hochdorf man's sister was the Asperg man's mother. The two men are the tallest individuals in the Iron Age skeletal record of southern Germany. None of the secondary burials in either mound was related to the man at its centre. A woman in the Magdalenenberg mound, 100 kilometres away and about a century older, was a third-degree relative of a man buried at Hochdorf. Researcher Joscha Gretzinger said power was "most likely inherited through biological succession, comparable to a dynasty." Roman writers later recorded the uncle-nephew bond among Celts. The Hochdorf finds are shown at the Keltenmuseum Hochdorf, opened in 1991.