They built themselves a small thatched hut, raised two children, and settled down to the rural life of farmers – the man tilled the fields, and every now and then would go out hunting; the woman looked after the house and the children, cooked, and did the washing. In their spare time they modelled clay vases, received visits from friends and neighbours and, in the cold winter months, told each other the tales of ancient lore by the fireplace.
Unfortunately, the story of this family does not have a happy ending. One day, a marauding band of murderers fell upon them unexpectedly: they wanted their land, their animals, their lives…
They took everything by brute force. An axe smashed the woman’s skull, a knife put an end to the man’s life, while the children, according to ‘investigators’, were probably smothered.
Their bodies were unearthed four years ago on the stream bed of the Saale, near Eulau in central Germany. All that’s left of them is an apparently confused bundle of bones. A closer look, however, reveals they were disposed in a very peculiar order: the order of love. The father’s hands are clasping his first-born, a 9-year-old boy, while the mother is embracing her 5-year-old son.
If you think I am reporting something from the latest crime news you are wide off the mark. This is the tragic epilogue of the first recorded nuclear family in history because the victims of this violence were buried about 4,600 years ago! Let me explain. This extraordinary find has unearthed the most ancient family unit, with DNA testing confirming the close kinship between the victims.
Quite obviously, families existed long before the Eulau family, but the find represents the earliest tangible evidence of the nuclear family.
“This family had a violent end,” says Wolfgang Haak, archaeologist of the University of Adelaide, one of the participants of the dig. “During Neolithical times conflicts often broke out between groups which were already practicing agriculture and other groups which were still at the hunting stage.”
The most probable scenario was that the able-bodied men of the village were away at the time of the attack, and the raiders took advantage of this fact to plunder the village. When the men returned they found the horrible surprise. They could do nothing more than to bury the victims, uniting them in death as they were in life, with the father embracing his first born and the mother her youngest child. Those left behind thus tried to patch back together those relationships which had been violently severed, as if to confer upon them a sort of continuity in the afterlife.
The oldest example of the nuclear family ever found, which was destroyed by an enemy clan, leads one to think about the fragility of the modern nuclear family which, unlike olden times, must now face foes of an entirely different nature, though by no means less treacherous.
Abortion, unfaithfulness, the lack of dialogue, closure to the gift of life, euthanasia, the rush to material well-being, and many other ‘enemies’ as well, are threatening today’s family.
What is the cause of all this? Certainly not the culture of life, because to destroy the family means to destroy the human person – each person making up the family.
Let’s rouse ourselves and do something! The family based on the union between a man and a woman is, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “the cradle of life and love, the first and indispensable teacher of peace”. Let’s not allow the idea of the family to be destroyed, let’s protect her from a fate metaphorically similar to the Eulau family 4,600 years ago; it’s our task as Christians today.
Updated on October 06 2016