Who were the pile-dwellers and how did they relate to other Neolithic and Bronze Age groups in Central Europe? How were pile-dwelling communities organized and how did they interact with each other? Ancient genomics provides a powerful tool to reconstruct the demographic histories, admixture processes, and polygenic adaptations of human populations. In some cases, it can even shed light on the social organization and kinship structures of past human communities. As a key objective of this project, we will reconstruct partial and/or complete ancient human genomes from the human DNA preserved in the ancient chewing gums from the lake settlements in order to examine the demographic history of the pile-dwelling communities, detect possible admixture events (e.g. the arrival of steppe ancestry), and to reconstruct kinship relations.