Geneticists have shed new light on the influence of the Roman Empire on southeastern Europe.
New DNA analysis has shown how the rise and fall of empires affected the population of the Balkans, a region of Europe that includes countries such as Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria.
The Roman Empire had a major influence on the Balkans, much of which was under Roman control from the 1st century AD to around the 5th century AD. However, researchers have found no evidence of Italian descent in the remains of the area from that era.Their findings will be published in a magazine cell.
Instead, the study revealed successive waves of migration from the Pontic-Kazakh steppes extending from western Anatolia, central and northern Europe, and eastern Europe to central Asia.
Miodrag Grbic / Carles Larusa-Foss
From the 7th century AD onwards, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, many people immigrated from Eastern Europe, probably related to the arrival of Slavic-speaking peoples.
“We have discovered genetic signals of Slavic migration across the Balkans,” said senior author and paleogeneticist Carles Larueza Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences, detailing the discovery. This was stated in a press release. “Given that the Balkans has a long history of conflict related to its identity, this could have important social and political implications.”
Since 700 AD, people in the Balkans have had an ancestral composition very similar to the region’s current populations, suggesting that these migrations led to the last major demographic changes in the region. Suggests.
Researchers analyzed DNA from 136 human remains from 20 different locations across the Balkans, the study reported. The research team focused on his three periods: 1 AD to 250 AD during the height of the Empire, 250 AD to 550 AD during the late Empire, and 550 AD to 1000 AD after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I guessed it.
Bodies were unearthed from small rural towns, military bases and large Roman cities.
To the researchers’ surprise, they found no evidence of Italian Iron Age descendants, but there was plenty of evidence of migration from western Anatolia, which was also under Roman rule.
“Ancient DNA can give a lot of insight into historical periods, especially in areas where historical sources are scarce or may or may not be biased,” said lead author and author of Population Genetics at the University of the Basque Country. says scholar Iñigo Olalde. said in a press release. “For example, most of the historical material in the Balkans comes from the Roman side, because the Slavs did not write at that time.”
Researchers also found evidence of individuals migrating to the Balkans from within and outside the Roman Empire. The remains of a 16-year-old man were found to be 100% East African, a research report said. The boy was found in the ruins of a large Roman city, along with an oil lamp with a picture of the Roman god Jupiter.
“This is the only complete East African we have analyzed, and it is also a clear outlier in terms of diet compared to other individuals buried in the same cemetery, which makes this individual clearly “It speaks to growing up outside the borders of the Roman Empire,” LaRuza-Fox said.
Isotopic analysis of his teeth showed that he consumed marine protein sources during his childhood and therefore may have grown up in a remote location.
The study also found evidence of mixed-race immigration from Northern Europe and the Pontic-Kazakh steppes during the late imperial period.
This suggests there may have been a “multiethnic coalition of migrating peoples,” senior author and population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University said in a press release.
“Although there has been debate about the extent to which these migrations were influential, and to what extent the spread of Slavic languages was primarily due to cultural influences and migration, our study “This shows that these migrations had a significant demographic impact,” Reich said.
“More than half of the ancestry of most peoples in the Balkans today derives from Slavic migration, and even in countries like Greece, where Slavic languages are not currently spoken, about one-third have Slavic ancestry. ,” he said.
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