Roman Empire’s collapse created a genetic melting pot in Europe

This skeleton from the early medieval site of Altheim belonged to a woman whose ancestors migrated from northern Europe several generations earlier. Credit: SAM/Harbeck After the collapse of the Roman Empire, its northern frontier became a melting pot of soldiers, farmers and ‘barbarians’, finds an analysis of ancient genomes from hundreds of burials in southern Germany. The populations and family practices present after the Empire’s fall in ad 476, in many ways, resemble those of modern Europe. Seven generations of a prehistoric family mapped with ancient DNA The findings, published today in Nature 1 , rebut popular ideas of northern barbarian tribes overrunning Roman territory. Instead, they point to gradual genetic and cultural shifts that occurred through small-scale migration and intermarriage. “That’s really important to put to bed — these romantic images of great peoples moving across the European countryside and destroying the Roman Empire,” says Patrick Geary, a medieval historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who was not involved in the study. Ancestry patterns The collapse of the western Roman Empire reverberated across Europe, reshaping political, religious and social systems. Ancient genomics has uncovered shifts in the genetic make-up of people in different parts of Europe during this time. But it was unclear whether these changes were due to mass migration or smaller-scale movements. …