roman-empire

The Roman Empire shows up in ancient DNA less as a single population than as mobility: people from Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean appear in Balkan and Italian cemeteries during the imperial centuries, provincial frontiers mix soldiers and locals, and the ancestry of a city like Rome shifts eastward. What the empire left in living genomes is a matter of measured descent from those movements, not of identity or nationhood.

The articles cover the Etruscans, whose genomes support local Iron Age origins, similarity to their Latin neighbours and major ancestry shifts under imperial Rome; the Roman-era Anatolian mobility and late-antique migrations seen in ancient Balkan DNA; the 258-genome study of migration, provincial mobility and family life along southern Germany's frontier after imperial rule; and the five Pompeii plaster casts whose DNA overturned family stories told about them for more than a century.