Throughout the long history of the Roman Empire, different populations connected in new ways, through trade routes, economic exchanges, imperial policies and related military ventures. An international research team in which the University of Padua participated and coordinated by Stanford University used genetic material extracted from ancient skeletons to reconstruct a detailed picture of long-range migrations and movements during the Empire's heyday. The study analyzed DNA from thousands of ancient humans, including 204 who had not been previously sequenced. The study showed how diverse the areas of the Roman Empire were in terms of genetic ancestry. At least 8 percent of the individuals included in the study were not from the area of Europe, Africa or Asia where they were buried. The new data led the researchers to a puzzling conundrum: if people had continued to move at the rate seen during the period studied, regional differences would have gradually begun to disappear. The genomes of Eastern European populations, for example, would have become indistinguishable from those of Western Europe and North Africa and vice versa. However, most of these populations remain genetically distinct. Nonetheless, there has been no homogenization of populations so that, even today, it is still possible to trace an individual's genome back to his or her geographic group with good approximation. This impact of migration, less than expected, can probably be traced back to the reduction in mobility following the fall of the Empire and the possibility of more complex integration of individuals moving into the social, and thus genetic, fabric of local populations.
|