The Top 10 Everything of 2008

10. First Family

Americans may boast of family values, but they've got nothing on the folks of Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany. That's the home region of what might be the most traditional — or at least the oldest — nuclear family ever uncovered. Researchers there excavated 4,600-year-old graves of a group of Stone-Agers who appeared to have been killed together in a raid — judging from the defensive wounds many of them bore and the projectile point embedded in the vertebra of one female. Among the remains was a foursome interred together — an adult male and female and two boys, one of them 8 to 9 years old, the other 4 to 5. Analyzing molecular DNA evidence, the investigators confirmed what the tableau suggested: This was a family. Certainly this is not the oldest one that ever existed, but merely the oldest ever unearthed. Still, for now it is, to scientists at least, the true First Family.

Connect to this TIME Story