Paleogeneticists have analyzed the DNA of a man who lived during the Roman Republic and concluded that the influx of people of Middle Eastern descent into the country likely occurred approximately 200 years earlier than previously thought. Until recently, researchers believed that the gene pool of the Italian Peninsula's population changed significantly during the Imperial era. The preprint is available at bioRxiv.org.
In the first millennium BCE, a number of cultures and peoples existed in the territory of modern-day Italy, which gradually came under Roman control. Recent research has shown that despite their cultural diversity, most of the conquered peoples of the Italian Peninsula were not significantly different from the Romans in terms of genetics. However, Rome's power gradually expanded far beyond this region, resulting, among other things, in the influx of genes from people with significantly different origins from the Romans. For example, previous research has indicated that during the Imperial period (27 BCE – 476 CE), a significant number of people of Eastern Mediterranean origin lived in the territory of modern-day Italy.
But in reality, it is possible that a significant gene flow from the East occurred earlier, during the Roman Republic (509–27 BC), as indirectly indicated by historical data on Roman conquests up to that time, as well as some already published genomes.
Francesco Ravasini of the University of Rome La Sapienza, together with colleagues from the UK, Italy, and Estonia, reported new evidence supporting the hypothesis that a significant influx of genes from the Middle East began several generations before the emergence of the Roman Empire. To this end, the scientists analyzed the DNA of a man whose remains were discovered during excavations at Villa Falgari, located approximately 70 kilometers from Rome.
The remains belonged to a man who, according to radiocarbon dating, lived between 341 and 53 BCE (likely at the end of the Roman Republic). Like many other inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula, but from the later Imperial era, his genome contained a significant admixture of Near Eastern populations, expressed in an ancestral component linked to the inhabitants of Neolithic Iran. The man's Eastern ancestry was also indicated by the sequence of his Y chromosome, which belongs to haplogroup R1-M269/Z2105 and is most closely related to previously published Y chromosomes of late Bronze and Iron Age individuals from the territory of Armenia. According to scientists' calculations, this man's ancestors received an influx of genes from the East approximately three to five generations before his birth.
The researchers concluded that previously identified changes in the gene pool of the population of Central Italy during the Roman Empire likely began approximately 200 years before the founding of the Roman Empire, that is, during the time of the Roman Republic. This is likely related to the annexation of lands in southern Italy (where, in addition to Greeks, for example, Phoenicians lived), the victory over Carthage, and the establishment of control over Macedonia, Greece, and Asia Minor.
Previously, Ravasini and his colleagues published another study examining the genetic history of the Picenes, a people who lived along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the first millennium BC. The scientists discovered that they differed from their contemporaries, the Etruscans, due to a greater contribution of ancestral components associated with the Yamnaya culture.
