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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32784 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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I mean aside from the fact that pretty much everyone in the Roman Empire was white-ish(the only province with a large population that didn’t have a predominately euro appearance was Egypt, and even that wasn’t universal) that’s an argument that has to be made, which you haven’t done.

That was true until Imperial Rome gave everyone citizenship. This was observed in a paper I linked in a different comment.

Look at the radical shift in the genetic profile from the Roman Republic to Imperial Rome. Granted, this may likely be exaggerated as non-Latin citizens would have been less likely to have been cremated than Latin Romans, so they may be oversampled in this analysis.

Late Antiquity and Fall of Rome:

The average ancestry of the Late Antique individuals (n = 24) shifts away from the Near East and toward modern central European populations in PCA (Fig. 3D)... This ancestry shift is also reflected in ChromoPainter results by the drastic shrinkage of the Near Eastern cluster (C4), maintenance of the two Mediterranean clusters (C5 and C6), and marked expansion of the European cluster (C7) (Fig. 4C).

Medieval Period:

In the Medieval and early modern periods (n = 28 individuals), we observe an ancestry shift toward central and northern Europe in PCA (Fig. 3E), as well as a further increase in the European cluster (C7) and loss of the Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean clusters (C4 and C5) in ChromoPainter (Fig. 4C). The Medieval population is roughly centered on modern-day central Italians (Fig. 3F). It can be modeled as a two-way combination of Rome’s Late Antique population and a European donor population, with potential sources including many ancient and modern populations in central and northern Europe: Lombards from Hungary, Saxons from England, and Vikings from Sweden, among others (table S26).

So non-European clusters emerged during Imperial Rome, and then disappeared by the Medieval period.

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