YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.aiTranscriptIntroduction
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.
A Roman poet in the early imperial period complained about the Orontes flowing into the Tiber.