31,000-Year-Old Grave Reveals Oldest Known Baby Twin Burial in The World

An ancient grave in Austria may represent the oldest burial of twins on record, a new study finds.

The 31,000-year-old burial dates to the Upper Paleolithic (a period lasting from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago), also known as the Old Stone Age. One of the infants died shortly after birth, while his twin brother lived for about 50 days, or just over 7 weeks, according to analyses of both babies.

A third infant, a 3-month-old, interred in a burial about 5 feet (1.5 meters) away is likely their cousin, according to the research, published online on 6 November in the journal Communications Biology.

Researchers found the twins’ oval-shaped burial at the archaeological site of Krems-Wachtberg, on the bank of the Danube River by the town center of Krems in 2005. The twin infants’ remains were covered with ochre, a red pigment often used in ancient burials across the world.

The twin infant remains. (Orea Öaw)

The double burial also contained 53 beads made out of mammoth ivory that were likely once threaded on a necklace, and a perforated fox incisor and three perforated mollusks, which were possibly necklace pendants, the researchers said. A mammoth shoulder blade placed over the burial protected the small bodies interred beneath it over the millennia. 

The nearby burial of the other infant also contained ochre, as well as a 3-inch-long (8 centimeters) mammoth-ivory pin, which may have fastened a leather garment together at the time of burial, the researchers said.

The finding made headlines shortly after its discovery, and researchers even created a replica of the twins’ burial, which went on display at the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2013.

However, scientists still had much to learn about the ancient burial. So, in the new project, an interdisciplinary group of researchers teamed up to decipher the relationship between these three infants and to determine their sex and age at death. 

Grave good including mammoth ivory beads (top and bottom left) and three shells (second to right). (Orea Öaw)

The study is the first on record to use ancient DNA to confirm twins in the archaeological record, the researchers said. And not just any twins, but identical twins. 

This is the “earliest proof of a twin birth,” study senior researcher Ron Pinhasi, an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Vienna, said in a statement (translated from German with Google Translate).

Researchers don’t know how common twin births were during the Upper Paleolithic (the rate fluctuates by region and time), but today, twins (both identical and fraternal) happen in about one in 85 births, while identical twins are born in about one in 250 births.

“To discover a multiple burial from the Paleolithic period is a specialty in itself,” study lead researcher Maria Teschler-Nicola, a biologist at the Natural History Museum Vienna, said in the statement. “The fact that sufficient and high-quality old DNA could be extracted from the fragile child’s skeletal remains for a genome analysis exceeded all of our expectations and can be compared to a lottery ticket.”

A genetic analysis of the third infant revealed that he was a third-degree…