Paleogeneticists have analyzed the DNA of a man who lived during the time of the Roman Republic and concluded that the influx of people of Middle Eastern descent into the country probably occurred about 200 years earlier than previously thought. Until recently, researchers had tended to believe that the gene pool of the population of the Apennine Peninsula changed significantly during the era of the Empire. The preprint is available at bioRxiv.org.
In the first millennium BC, the territory of modern Italy was home to a number of cultures and peoples who gradually came under Roman control. As recent research has shown, despite their cultural diversity, most of the conquered peoples of the Italian Peninsula were not very different from the Romans in terms of genetics. However, Rome’s power gradually spread far beyond this region, which resulted, among other things, in the influx of genes from people who were significantly different in their origins from the Romans. Thus, past research has indicated that during the Imperial era (27 BC – 476 AD), the territory of modern Italy was inhabited by a significant number of people of Eastern Mediterranean origin.
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 by some already published genomes.
Francesco Ravasini of the Sapienza University of Rome, together with colleagues from the UK, Italy and Estonia, reported new evidence in support of the hypothesis that a significant influx of genes from the Near East began several generations before the emergence of the Roman Empire. To do this, the scientists analyzed the DNA of a man whose remains were found during excavations at the Villa Falgari, located about 70 kilometers from Rome.
The remains belonged to a man who lived, judging by the results of radiocarbon dating, around 341–53 BC (probably at the end of the Roman Republic). Like many other inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula, but later in the Imperial era, his genome contained a significant admixture of Near Eastern populations, expressed in an ancestral component associated with the inhabitants of Neolithic Iran. That the man had Eastern ancestors was also indicated by the sequence of his Y chromosome, which belongs to the haplogroup R1-M269/Z2105 and is closest to previously published Y chromosomes of people of the late Bronze and Iron Ages from the territory of Armenia. According to the scientists' calculations, the influx of genes from the East was received by the ancestors of this man approximately three to five generations before his birth.
The researchers concluded that the previously identified changes in the gene pool of the population of Central Italy during the Roman Empire probably began about 200 years before its formation, that is, during the time of the Roman Republic. Apparently, this is due to the annexation of lands in southern Italy (where, in addition to the Greeks, for example, the Phoenicians lived), the victory over Carthage, and the establishment of control over Macedonia, Greece and Asia Minor.
Earlier, Ravasini and his colleagues published another work in which they described the genetic history of the Picenes, a people who lived on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the first millennium BC. The scientists found that they differed from their contemporaries, the Etruscans, due to a greater contribution of the ancestral component associated with the carriers of the Yamnaya culture.
