The rise and fall of the Roman Empire were accompanied by internal and external migration flows that caused demographic and cultural changes in the Balkans. This is concluded by an international study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) of Barcelona and Harvard University (United States), after analyzing the genome of 146 people who inhabited the region during the first millennium, and comparing it with archaeological evidence. and history of the area.
The research, published this Wednesday in the journal Cell, has confirmed the Balkan Peninsula as a bordering region of the Roman Empire, with poorly defined borders and a rich cultural mix, in which migrations were more the norm than the exception. Among the remains analyzed there is practically no trace of Italian ancestry, but geneticists have identified individuals with Turkish, Central European and Slavic genetic heritage mobilized in three different eras, which shaped the current populations.
The work has brought together “all the disciplines of the past on the same team,” explains Carles Lalueza-Fox, principal investigator of the IBE and one of the coordinators of the study, in conversation with La Vanguardia. Each one separately gives “independent photographs of the same thing, taken from different angles,” but “putting them all together gives a broader vision,” he explains.
The layer that genetic evidence has contributed to archaeological and historical knowledge has shown how Roman culture permeated the Balkan territory without Italian DNA reaching it. None of the 146 bodies analyzed had Roman traces in their genome, so migration from the heart of the Empire to its northeastern border, if it existed, was scarce. The discovery was surprising for historians, according to Lalueza-Fox, who also directs the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences (MCNB).
Instead, the area revealed itself as a favorite destination for the inhabitants of the Anatolic Peninsula, where Turkey is today, and the rest of the Middle East. The genetic data show a “significant migration” during the first quarter of the millennium, according to the authors, promoted by the wealth of Roman cities in the Balkans. The integration was total, according to Íñigo Olalde, Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country and one of the authors of the work, to the point that “we found a sarcophagus […] where a man of local descent and a woman of local descent were buried. Anatolic ancestry.
The call of the wealth of the Balkan cities reached beyond the borders of the empire. Researchers have found the remains of an individual from Sudan, buried in such a way that he could have been part of the Roman military forces. “This shows us a diverse and cosmopolitan Roman Empire, which welcomed populations far beyond the European continent,” concludes Lalueza-Fox.
Genetic analysis has also confirmed that the borders of the Roman Empire were diffuse, and that the entry of barbarian populations—inhabitants of central and northern Europe—during Italian rule was common, although a minority. His genetic imprint did not last over time.
“Starting in the 3rd century we began to find individuals who clearly came from outside,” details the director of the MCNB. “We found individuals with ancestry from the steppes of Central Asia, individuals with Germanic ancestry, mixed individuals…” The genetic evidence corroborates the archaeological diagnosis, given that the skulls analyzed show deformations typical of steppe nomads.
With the fall of the Roman Empire came the Slavic migrations. The genetic evidence of fifty individuals who lived in the last 300 years of the first millennium suggests a broad and lasting movement, which involved entire families for several generations. These currents produced a profound demographic change in Balkan societies, whose influence continues to this day, according to researchers.
The genetic footprint of these movements represents between 30 and 60% of the ancestry of the current Balkan population. That is to say that the genome of the current inhabitants is an almost equal mixture between the original Mediterranean populations and the Slavic ones. The countries further north, such as Serbia and Croatia, are those that show a greater Slavic contribution in their genome, while the influence falls as we go south, without ever ceasing to be significant. Even in Greece, where the language is completely different, 30% of its DNA comes from the Slavic peoples.
“The image that emerges is not one of division, but of shared history. Iron Age people living in the Balkan region were similarly affected by migrations during the Roman Empire and by Slavic migrations later. Together, these influences resulted in the genetic profile of the modern Balkans, regardless of national borders,” summarizes Miodrag Grbic, professor at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) and co-author of the work, in a press release.
The study is the first to genetically describe the recent history of the Balkans, an area marked by political and social conflicts linked to collective identities based on “epic narratives of the past,” describes Lalueza-Fox. The researcher is carrying out similar work in the Iberian Peninsula, to analyze the role of the Visigoths in current societies.
The history of the Balkans will not stop here either. “We want to do a second phase of the Viminacium site,” the main Roman city in present-day Serbia, explains the Catalan researcher. The enclave was abandoned after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which represents an advantage over the rest of the Roman cities: “We have enormous necropolises of thousands of individuals.”
“We can consider a type of study that has never been done, which is to analyze all the individuals in a necropolis to see what relationship there is between genetics and social status, or location within the site,” continues the IBE researcher. The next step, therefore, “is to study between 500 and 1,000 individuals from a single necropolis,” he concludes.