On the outskirts of the English city of York there is a Roman-era cemetery where the bodies of more than 80 young men have been found, some with wounds caused by large animals and half of them without heads. These signs make researchers suspect that it is gladiators who came from distant parts of the empire, according to first genetic tests.
We now know that one of those men who lived between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD had Scandinavian blood in his veins. According to a new work published this Wednesday in the magazine Naturethat Norse individual was in the British Isles long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, which began later, in the 5th century AD
The new work, led by the team of Leo Speidel and Pontus Skoglund from the Francis Crick Institute, offers unprecedented details on population movements during the first millennium thanks to a new tool called twigstats. This new approach analyzes more recent mutations to reveal connections between people who lived closer to each other in time and makes it possible to reconstruct genetic ancestors over periods that until now were out of focus because they were too short and recent.
A first excursion to the south
The authors have applied the analysis method to 1,556 genomes of people who lived in Europe between 500 BC and 500 BC. C. and 1000 AD. C., a period that covers the Iron Age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the “period of great migrations” (previously known as the “barbarian migrations”) and the Viking Age. The result reveals that waves of Germanic groups migrated south from northern Germany or Scandinavia at the beginning of the first millennium, which would explain the presence of this Norse gladiator in York at such an early date.
Waves of Germanic groups migrated south from northern Germany or Scandinavia in the early first millennium
This ancestry has been found in people who lived in this period in southern Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and southern Britain. There has also been a person found in southern Europe whose ancestry was 100% Scandinavian. The team shows that many of these groups ended up mixing with pre-existing populations and that the two main areas of migration and interaction coincide with the three main branches of the Germanic languages; one of them remained in Scandinavia, another became extinct and a third formed the basis of today’s German and English.
Waves back and forth
These movements from north to south were sometimes round trips, according to the analysis of the genomes. The authors show that Germanic-speaking peoples moved towards Scandinavia before the Viking Age, in a wave of migration at the end of the Iron Age (between 300-800 AD), as demonstrated by the fact that Many individuals from this period found in southern Scandinavia had Central European ancestry.
Likewise, thanks to a different type of biomolecular analysis of the teeth, it was found that the people buried on the island of Öland, in Sweden, had Central European ancestry and had remained in the area for generations, suggesting that this influx of people northward was not an isolated event, but rather a lasting shift in ancestry.
Archaeological evidence of repeated conflicts in Scandinavia at that time in history leads researchers to believe that these unrest may have played a role in driving people’s movements, although more archaeological, genetic and environmental data are needed to shed light on the reasons why. these individuals moved to and around Scandinavia, they argue.
The great Viking expansion
The genetic results also support historical records about the expansion of Scandinavian peoples, known as the Viking Age (between 800 and 1050 AD) in which they made numerous raids and settled throughout Europe. Research shows that the genome of many people outside Scandinavia during this time contains a mixture of local and Scandinavian ancestry. The team found, for example, that some individuals from this period who lived in present-day Ukraine and Russia had ancestry from present-day Sweden and individuals in Britain had ancestry from present-day Denmark.
In some Viking Age mass graves in Britain, the remains of men who died violently also showed genetic links to Scandinavia, suggesting they may have been executed members of Viking raiding parties, according to the Francis Crick Institute in a note. press.
Completing the puzzle
“We already had reliable statistical tools to compare genetics between groups of people who are genetically very different, such as hunter-gatherers and early farmers,” says Speidel, “but robust analyzes of population changes at finer scales, such as migrations that we reveal in this article, had not been possible until now.”
Questions that we would not have been able to answer before are now within our reach.
Pontus Skoglund
— Researcher at the Francis Crick Institute and co-author of the article
“Twigstats allows us to see what we couldn’t see before, in this case, the migrations across Europe that originated in the north in the Iron Age, and then returned to Scandinavia before the Viking Age,” adds the researcher. . “Our new method can be applied to other populations around the world and hopefully reveal more missing pieces of the puzzle.”
“The goal was a data analysis method that would provide a clearer, finer-scale view of genetic history,” Skoglund says. “Questions that we would not have been able to answer before are now within our reach, so we need to increase the record of sequences of complete ancient genomes.”
The nature, scale and even trajectories of these movements have always been hotly debated. Twigstats opens up the exciting possibility of solving it
Peter Heather
— Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and co-author of the article
“Historical sources indicate that migration played some role in the massive restructuring of the human landscape of western Eurasia in the second half of the first millennium AD. C., which created for the first time the contours of a politically and culturally recognizable Europe. But the nature, scale and even trajectories of the movements have always been the subject of heated debate,” he concludes. Peter Heatherprofessor of Medieval History at King’s College London and co-author of the article. “Twigstats opens up the exciting possibility of finally resolving these crucial questions.”
A genetic ‘magnifying glass’
“Using this new, more precise genetic analysis tool, the authors discover data that was not known until now, such as, for example, that in Scandinavia there were two genetically distinguishable populations, one that included Norway and the northern half of Sweden, and another that included the southern region of Scandinavia including present-day Denmark,” notes Gemma Marfanyprofessor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona (UB). “In addition, they also reveal the genetic relationship and common ancestry in regions of Portugal, France, Germany, Austria and Great Britain, reflecting the genetic flow between European populations who spoke Celtic languages.”
The study reveals the common genetic relationship in regions of Portugal, France, Germany, Austria and Great Britain and the genetic flow between European populations who spoke Celtic languages
Gemma Marfany
— Professor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona (UB)
Inigo Olaldea specialist in ancient DNA at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), believes that the most interesting thing about this work is the new methodology. In previous works in which he has participated, he emphasizes, they had already seen a great mobility of populations in Roman times, with an individual with Middle Eastern ancestry in a British site, for example. “It was a very large empire and there was a lot of mobility, probably because there were no borders,” he points out.
Regarding these results, Olalde recalls that we already knew in general terms that the Germanic migrations had affected all of Europe and that the Vikings had left from the year 800 towards the center of Europe or Great Britain. In his opinion, what differentiates this work is the use of the Twigstats tool. Traditional ancient DNA analysis systems have until now been based on relatively common genetic variants that were present in all populations at a relatively high frequency.
“As Neolithic farmers had a lot of genetic differentiation, these techniques were useful to us,” Olalde explains to elDiario.es. “But if you go into the historical period, the populations have already spent 10,000 years mixing and are much less genetically differentiated.”
What this new system does is look for variants that are very rare and found in very few individuals, which provides a resolution of a few hundred years, he says. In return, scientists now need very high quality genomes; highly fragmented and damaged samples are no longer useful, as was the case with DNA from much older periods. “Now we have a magnifying glass that gives us much more precision, but we also need higher quality DNA to analyze it,” he concludes.
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