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Ancient Roman Genetics

 I know that I have some ancient ancestry from the Romans due to my recent European ancestry being Portuguese, English, Ashkenazi Jew, German, Swiss, Spanish, Scottish, Irish, French, Welsh, Dutch, and Frisian.

At MyTrueAncestry, my mother and I have a lot of Roman DNA samples.

Two of my British Colonial Virginian family lines maternal Walker and paternal Goodman have J2 Y DNA haplogroups. Walker family line has a J2-L70 haplogroup.  

Two of my paternal Acadian family lines Dugas and Gautrot/Gautreau have J2 Y DNA haplogroups. Dugas has a J2a haplogroup

One of my paternal Acadian family lines d'Entremont has a Y DNA E1b1b1 haplogroup 

One of my British Colonial Connecticut lines Hoyt has a Y DNA E1b1b1 haplogroup.

The Romans spread J2 and E1b1b in various areas in Europe.

Therefore, I  am very interested in the genetic history of Rome.

Stanford researchers lay out first genetic history of Rome

The study, published Nov. 8 in Science, focuses on the ancient DNA of individuals from Rome and adjacent regions in Italy. Those genetic data reveal at least two major migrations into Rome, as well as several smaller but significant population shifts over just the last few thousand years, according to Jonathan Pritchard, a professor of genetics and biology and one of the paper’s senior authors.

DNA analysis revealed that as the Roman Empire expanded around the Mediterranean Sea, immigrants from the Near East, Europe and North Africa pulled up their roots and moved to Rome. This significantly changed the face of one of the ancient world’s first great cities. 

To find out what that makeup looked like, the Stanford team partnered with a host of European researchers, including senior authors Alfredo Coppa, a professor of physical anthropology at Sapienza University, and Ron Pinhasi, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Vienna, to gather 127 human DNA samples from 29 sites in and around Rome dating from between the Stone Age and medieval times.

An analysis of some of the earliest samples more or less comports with what has been found around Europe – they represent an influx of farmers primarily descended from early agriculturalists from Turkey and Iran around 8,000 years ago, followed by a shift toward ancestry from the Ukrainian steppe somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. By the founding of Rome, traditionally dated to 753 BCE, the city’s population had grown in diversity and resembled modern European and Mediterranean peoples.

As the empire expanded, contemporary accounts and archaeological evidence indicate there were tight connections between Rome and other parts of its domain built through trade, military campaigns, new roads and slavery – and the genetic history corroborates but also complicates the story. There was a massive shift in Roman residents’ ancestry, the researchers found, but that ancestry came primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, possibly because of denser populations there relative to the Roman Empire’s western reaches in Europe and Africa.

The next several centuries were full of turmoil: the empire split in two, diseases decimated Rome’s population and a series of invasions befell the city. Those events left a mark on the city’s population, which shifted toward western European ancestry. Later, the rise and reign of the Holy Roman Empire brought an influx of central and northern European ancestry.

https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/07/genetic-history-rome/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfEck9mUoJA


Genetic studies show that the ancient Romans had ancestry from Neolithic Anatolians, Neolithic Iranians, Neolithic Ukraine Steppe people and ancestry from Post-Iron Age Eastern Mediterraneans and Post-Iron Age Near Easterners. Rome was supposed to have been founded in the middle of the 8th Century B.C.E.


A 2017 archaeogenetic study, titled "Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans", analyzed 10 Minoan and 4 Mycenaean samples, and found that both population groups shared at least 75% of their autosomal ancestry with the Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, commonly known as Early European Farmers. Ancient Greeks were in Southern Italy by 8th Century B.C.E There is Magna Graecia in Southern Italy to consider.


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