Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2019 Nov 8;366(6466):708-714.

doi: 10.1126/science.aay6826.

Ziyue Gao # 2 3, Hannah M Moots # 4, Michaela Lucci 5, Francesca Candilio 6 7, Susanna Sawyer 8, Victoria Oberreiter 8, Diego Calderon 1, Katharina Devitofranceschi 8, Rachael C Aikens 1, Serena Aneli 9, Fulvio Bartoli 10, Alessandro Bedini 11, Olivia Cheronet 8, Daniel J Cotter 3, Daniel M Fernandes 8 12, Gabriella Gasperetti 13, Renata Grifoni 14, Alessandro Guidi 15, Francesco La Pastina 7, Ersilia Loreti 16, Daniele Manacorda 17, Giuseppe Matullo 9, Simona Morretta 18, Alessia Nava 5 19, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai 20, Federico Nomi 15, Carlo Pavolini 21, Massimo Pentiricci 16, Philippe Pergola 22, Marina Piranomonte 23, Ryan Schmidt 24, Giandomenico Spinola 25, Alessandra Sperduti 19 26, Mauro Rubini 27 28, Luca Bondioli 19, Alfredo Coppa 29, Ron Pinhasi # 30, Jonathan K Pritchard # 31 3 28

Affiliations

Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean

Margaret L Antonio et al. Science. 2019.

Abstract

Ancient Rome was the capital of an empire of ~70 million inhabitants, but little is known about the genetics of ancient Romans. Here we present 127 genomes from 29 archaeological sites in and around Rome, spanning the past 12,000 years. We observe two major prehistoric ancestry transitions: one with the introduction of farming and another prior to the Iron Age. By the founding of Rome, the genetic composition of the region approximated that of modern Mediterranean populations. During the Imperial period, Rome's population received net immigration from the Near East, followed by an increase in genetic contributions from Europe. These ancestry shifts mirrored the geopolitical affiliations of Rome and were accompanied by marked interindividual diversity, reflecting gene flow from across the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa.

Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.. Overview of study individuals, major events in Roman history, and key findings.

Time periods covered in this study are shown by color blocks, with reported samples represented by dots on the left side. A map of the sites from which individuals were sampled is shown in the top left. Present-day Rome, and its administrative province Lazio, are shown.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.. Overview of the genetic structure of 127 ancient individuals from central Italy.

(A) Individuals reported here (colored points) projected onto a principal component space defined by modern-day individuals. Crosses represent variation (±2 SDs) of published ancient (black) and modern (gray) populations. Black circles and arrows highlight three major temporal clusters. The colored labels indicate five source populations used for supervised ADMIXTURE. (B) Supervised ADMIXTURE analysis performed with Western hunter-gatherer (WHG), Neolithic Anatolian, Neolithic Iranian, Eneolithic Steppe, and Morocco hunter-gatherer (Iberomaurusian) as the source populations (k = 5).

Fig. 3.

Fig. 3.. Ancestry shifts of the Roman population during the historic era.

(A to F) In each panel, the PCA (left) shows reported individuals (red points); a bold ellipse describes variation across individuals in this time period, whereas fainter ellipses are from preceding panels (multivariate t-distribution at a 0.80 confidence level). In blue are potential incoming sources identified by qpAdm modeling. The map (right) illustrates the territorial expanse of the political body encompassing Rome at the date specified at the bottom, with the blue arrow indicating the approximate direction of gene flow. No source provides an adequate fit for the Imperial Roman population (C). Individuals identified as outliers by an f4 test are labeled with their sample IDs (table S27). Present-day populations are represented by gray points, with labels shown in (A).

Fig. 4.

Fig. 4.. Haplotype sharing between ancient Italian individuals and present-day population reveals fine population genetic structure.

(A) Total length of haplotype segments shared between present-day populations (rows) and reported study individuals (columns) (fig. S22). K-means clustering was performed on rows and columns. Individuals mentioned in the text are labeled with their sample IDs. Annotations beneath the heatmap denote the time period for each individual and an identifier for the ancestry cluster. (B) PCA with study individuals (points) colored on the basis of their cluster membership in (A). (C) A mosaic plot showing the haplotype cluster membership [defined in (A)] for each time period (rows).

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