Stanford researchers lay out first genetic history of Rome

Stanford News Service ^ | November 7th, 2019 | Nathan Collins

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Stanford researchers and their European colleagues drew on ancient DNA to construct the first genetic history of Rome...Those genetic data reveal at least two major migrations into Rome, as well as several smaller but significant population shifts over just the last few thousand years...

Notably, DNA analysis revealed that as the Roman Empire expanded around the Mediterranean Sea, immigrants from the Near East, Europe and North Africa pulled up their roots and moved to Rome...

An analysis of some of the earliest samples more or less comports with what has been found around Europe -- they represent an influx of farmers primarily descended from early agriculturalists from Turkey and Iran around 8,000 years ago, followed by a shift toward ancestry from the Ukrainian steppe somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. By the founding of Rome... the city's population had grown in diversity and resembled modern European and Mediterranean peoples...

Although Rome began as a humble city-state, within 800 years it had gained control over an empire extending as far west as Britain, south into North Africa and east into Syria, Jordan and Iraq.

As the empire expanded, contemporary accounts and archaeological evidence indicate there were tight connections between Rome and other parts of its domain built through trade, military campaigns, new roads and slavery -- and the genetic history corroborates but also complicates the story. There was a massive shift in Roman residents' ancestry, the researchers found, but that ancestry came primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, possibly because of denser populations there relative to the Roman Empire's western reaches in Europe and Africa.

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TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: bronzeage; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; romanempire

[SunkenCiv]

An increasing number of studies have used DNA sampled from ancient skeletons to fill in important details of human history. In a new study, published November 8 in Science, Stanford researchers and their European colleagues drew on ancient DNA to construct the first genetic history of Rome. Their data reveal major shifts in the ancestry of people living in Rome, as well as several smaller shifts corresponding to important events in the history and politics of Rome. [Video by Farrin Abbott]

Ancient skeletons used to map the genetic history of Rome | 2:54 
Stanford | 2.15M subscribers | 33,565 views | November 7, 2019

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[SunkenCiv]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai

Transcript

Introduction

So we collected DNA from ancient skeletons from in and around Rome, spanning over the last 12,000 years, and we analyzed these DNA samples to understand the history of the Roman population.

I'm Jonathan Pritchard. I'm in the Department of Biology and Genetics at Stanford University.

I'm Hannah Moots. I'm a PhD student at Stanford in Anthropology. And I've been lucky enough to work on this project where we've looked at ancient DNA from 29 different sites in and around Rome. That's 127 individuals spanning the last 12,000 years.

And in particular, we were interested in understanding the shifts in the population during the historical period during the Roman Empire. We found that there were tremendous amounts of immigration into Rome during the historical period, and that these reflected in many cases political alliances of Rome with other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean.

History

Though according to myth, Rome was founded in the Iron Age and around 753 BCE by the twin Romulus and Remus. In this period, Rome was a small city-state like many of its neighbors in central Italy. But in the next century, as it starts to grow, first across the Italian peninsula, and then it starts to expand across the Mediterranean to North Africa, other parts of Europe, and the Near East.

So one of the most interesting things that we see is that during the first century CE, which was really the heart of the imperial period, we see at that time that there's a huge amount of immigration that's coming into Rome, mainly from the Near East, coming either directly or indirectly. And that's enough to actually shift the average ancestry of people who are living in Rome to look much more eastern at that time.

We get to late antiquity. In this period, it's characterized by a lot of political change. The Roman Empire starts to fall apart. It breaks into an eastern and a western half. The capital moves from Rome to Constantinople. And what we're seeing, genetically, actually reflects some of these shifts, which is interesting. So we see sort of shift away from Near Eastern ancestry, and we see more individuals who are living in Rome with ancestry from western and northern Europe.

Immigration

One thing that's really striking to me is how much immigration there was at different times from different places, so that the genetic makeup of the population is shifting significantly from time to time over periods of just a few centuries.

And then secondly, starting from almost 3,000 years ago, Rome was already a very cosmopolitan place. So living side by side in the same population are people who have ancestry from quite different places, including from Europe, from North Africa, from the Near East. And even within time periods, there's a lot of mixing of different kinds of people. So it's kind of like that Rome was a melting pot, even going back very far to the past.

[PGR88]

Where have a seen a similar phenomenon afterwards?

[jroehl]

And they brought over 5 million Indians to replace all of their scribes and called it the H1B visa program.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Any sign they came from Troy?

[larrytown]

[Verginius Rufus]

A Roman poet in the early imperial period complained about the Orontes flowing into the Tiber.

[spintreebob]

Abram of Chaldea was an immigrant who went west. And then climate change forced him to go south “with much gold and silver and cattle and employees.

And then his grandkid had to bring in immigrant wives from the old country.

Noah, his kids and daughters in-law set off in a boat and landed no where near where they started.

How many immigrant stories are untold?

Do we realize that most Mexicans are immigrants from Italy, France, Spain, Portugal? But they do have a small percentage of northern European, African and Asian genes?

[Paal Gulli]

For all its barbarity, Rome was, in may ways, a very democratic culture. The Emperor Pertinax (who ruled Rome for 87 days) was the son of a freed slave.