GENchangers: Unraveled Secrets from Early Medieval Burial Grounds

In 8th-century Leobersdorf, most people were of East Asian descent. Twenty kilometres away in Mödling, they were European. Archaeology would never have told them apart: both buried their dead with near-identical jewellery and the same belt buckles. Ancient DNA did, and the team joked the show could have been called "Mödling and Leobersdorf don't sleep together". Both towns are now on the same Südbahn line.

You start at a round centrepiece on those two Avar-period cemeteries, where rebuilt family trees show who had children with whom and who lies next to whom. Wives tended to come from outside, and relatives were buried side by side. Eight stations around it widen out to Huns, Goths, Lombards, Slavs and Roman Pannonia, drawing on HistoGenes, a project covering 7,700 burials. Historian Walter Pohl's conclusion: "Culture is not biologically determined."

It is in Hall 21, with hands-on areas where you follow the clues in bones, genes and artefacts. Entry is the €18 museum ticket, under-19s free. Closed Tuesdays, open until 20:00 on Wednesdays.