Prehistoric Humans Rarely Mated with their Cousins

upstart writes:

Prehistoric humans rarely mated with their cousins:

At present-day, more than ten percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Chicago investigated how common close parental relatedness was in our ancestors.

The researchers re-analyzed previously published DNA data from ancient humans that lived during the last 45,000 years to find out how closely related their parents were. The results were surprising: Ancient humans rarely chose their cousins as mates. In a global dataset of 1,785 individuals only 54, that is, about three percent, show the typical signs of their parents being cousins. Those 54 did not cluster in space or time, showing that cousin matings were sporadic events in the studied ancient populations. Notably, even for hunter-gatherers who lived more than 10,000 years ago, unions between cousins were the exception.

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