Cultural affiliation accounts for most of the spatiotemporal variation in burial rite practices

Describing and interpreting spatiotemporal patterns in human culture has been a central focus of anthropology and archaeology for over a century. Recent ethnographic studies have highlighted the complexity of the processes generating these patterns, including isolation-by-distance, homophily, and common descent. However, investigating these processes in prehistoric archaeology remains challenging. Here we make use of a new interdisciplinary database and a combined dataset of ancient DNA (aDNA) genomic sequences to analyse the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns in cultural and genomic variation, by testing whether broadly defined clusters of genomic affinities correspond to spatiotemporal changes in burial rites while controlling for other factors using a Gaussian process model. We use data from the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database (BIAD), linking mortuary information from ~4,200 individuals with genetic ancestry and mobility data inferred from over 1,300 human genomes, from Western Eurasia ~10,000–2000 BP. By integrating and modelling these datasets, we assess how genomic history intersects with cultural evolution, including the extent to which genes and culture are transmitted in parallel. For burial orientation, cultural affiliation accounts for most variation with little to no role for ancestry, while for body position cultural affiliation also plays an important role.