SAM/Harbeck
Skeleton from the medieval archaeological site of Altheim, which belonged to a woman whose ancestors migrated from northern Europe several generations earlier
A team of researchers who analyzed genomes from early medieval tombs in present-day Germany suggests that populations from the ancient Roman Empire formed families with Germanic people shortly after the fall of the empire.
After centuries of colonial rule in Europe, the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century AD., weakened by internal conflicts and attacks by Germanic tribes. The empire’s long reign and its dissolution left an immense legacy in the modern history of Europe — including its ancestries.
In a published last week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers analyzed more than 250 genomes from early medieval tombs in what is now southern Germany.
They discovered a family tree of roman bloodlines and northern Europe, which, according to the study’s authors, were intertwined around the collapse of Rome to give rise to a new community.
The conclusions contradict the popular narrative according to which the end of the empire brought only conflict between Romans and people of northern Europenote to .
“Traditionally, all of history… was seen as a clash of civilizations between Germanic hordes from the north and the Roman Empire from the south,” he says Joachim Burgeranthropologist and population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Germany, and co-author of the study,
“In reality, it is another story of peaceful integration”, adds Burguer, speaking to .
In their study, the researchers extracted the genomes of row grave cemeteries located in German regions close to the northern border of the Roman Empire. The tombs date back to between 400 and 700 AD and belonged to communities of small farmers and livestock breeders.
According to one from JGU, researchers compared these genomes with around 2900 others: ancient, early medieval and modern samples from northern and southern Germany.
What they found was a community of people of mixed ancestry. According to , genomes from the tombs suggest that southern Romans and northern Germanic peoples began to marry among themselves soon after the end of Roman rule, “as social borders were blurred”.
«This flow was not driven by large tribal blocs ethnically homogeneous groups or by larger clans, but rather by small kinship groups and even by isolated individuals», says Burger to Reuters. “This pattern directly contradicts the traditional narrative of a ‘mass barbarian invasion’ following the collapse of Rome.”
Researchers estimate that the men buried in the graves had a average life expectancy of 43 yearswhile women lived until about 40. Almost 10% of boys died in childhood or during early childhood, compared to about 8% of girls.
Almost 25% of children lost at least one parent before the age of 10, but most grew up with their grandparents, according to the study.
According to the university’s statement, the households analyzed were made up of nuclear families, with husbands and wives in monogamy; the community avoided “marriages between close relatives” and widows did not remarry within the families of deceased husbands.
«All these characteristics reflect Christian norms of Late Antiquity», says Burger to Reuters. At that time, the Roman Empire had already adopted Christianity as its state religion.
The fact that an “early medieval, presumably Germanic society” was practicing Roman funerary rituals demonstrates that “Late Antiquity it didn’t actually end; It’s just transforming in a new society, less urban and more agricultural», concludes Burguer.
