People Encouraged To Marry Their First Cousin In Parts of Ancient Greece

DW: So good to see West Virginia keeping that spirit alive!

New research by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany analyzed over 100 genomes of people from the Bronze Age, and the team says they found that people around Greece frequently married their first cousins during that period.

Researchers think that marriage to first cousins was practical…to keep family land from being split with other families. The study revealed that around half of the people in the area married their first cousin, which prompted archaeologist Professor Philipp Stockhammer to say “It’s not 100%, but not everybody has a cousin.”

Source: CNN