Roman DNA project

[Robert Vermaat]

A nice article about a research project into the background of the 'common' Roman living in or near Rome in (mostly) the 1st-3rd century AD, buried in the Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco cemetaries:

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/...t-majority

Many seem to have been immigrants, and there's also possible a nice trend visible in the Roman suburbs – the closer to Rome, the shorter the population! hock:

[pavka]

Yes, urban life was not (still is not) too good for people. When they switched from hunter-gatherer to sedentary lifestyle, both average height and average lifespan dropped considerably.

[Epictetus]

By also utilisng strontium and oxygen isotope analysis it became apparent that about one-third of the individuals studied had immigrated to Rome after childhood, but the analysis could not reveal where they had originated from.

This is interesting. If I remember Brunt's Italian Manpower correctly, he suggested that in the city of Rome itself the organic population growth rate was basically zero, and all of its growth came from immigration.

[authun]

It's ambitious and will produce valuable information, but it is costly and unlikely to yield many answers. Isotopic analyses of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium rarely pinpoint origin but usually narrow it down to two or three possible locations. Only when we have a large database of results will patterns emerge.

Ancient DNA analyses are fraught with technical difficulties and for the male line, yDNA, there is the inescapable fact that it mostly degenerates over time so no matter how good the techniques of retrieval and analyses, if there is not enough of it, there is nothing to gleaned from it. We only have something like 30 successful results from graves spanning the palaeolithic to the 7th/8th cent. AD.

The female line is much more robust and we have many more successful mtDNA studies, some of which have yielded surprising results, even if we don't yet know how to interpret those results. Studies like this have more value as data acquisition than interpretation and it's a shame that they are so expensive.

But, they are getting cheaper all the time. What used to cost $1,000,000 now costs $10,000. One day, these things will be routine.