Genomic History of the Balkan Peninsula: A Major Role of East Mediterranean and East African Migrations

Sunday - December 24 2023, 06:41 UTC - 11 months ago

A multidisciplinary study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology reconstructs the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era. This research highlights a profound impact of migrations during and after the Roman Empire, including the arrival of people speaking Slavic languages and influx of people of Anatolian descent, leaving a long-term genetic imprint in the Balkans, and cases of sporadic long-distance mobility from far-away regions. This underscores the shared demographic history across the Balkans.

A multidisciplinary study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Spain (a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council and Pompeu Fabra University), the University of Belgrade in Serbia, the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and Harvard University in the USA, reconstructs the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era, a time and place of profound demographic, cultural and linguistic change .

The team has recovered and analyzed whole genome data from 146 ancient people excavated primarily from Serbia and Croatia—more than a third of which came from the Roman military frontier at the massive archaeological site of Viminacium in Serbia—which they co-analyzed with data from the rest of the Balkans and nearby regions. The work, published in the journal Cell, highlights the cosmopolitanism of the Roman frontier and the long-term consequences of migrations that accompanied the breakdown of Roman control, including the arrival of people speaking Slavic languages .

Archaeological DNA reveals that despite nation-state boundaries that divide them, populations in the Balkans have been shaped by shared demographic processes.Massive demographic influx into the Balkans from the East during the Roman Empire – largely from the eastern Mediterranean and even from East Africa — was found by the team. After Rome occupied the Balkans it turned this border region into a crossroads, one that would eventually give rise to 26 Roman Emperors, including Constantine the Great who shifted the capital of the empire to the eastern Balkans when he founded the city of Constantinople .

The team’s analysis of ancient DNA shows that during the period of Roman control, there was a large demographic contribution of people of Anatolian descent that left a long-term genetic imprint in the Balkans. This ancestry shift is very similar to what a previous study showed happened in the megacity of Rome itself—the original core of the empire—but it is remarkable that this also occurred at the Roman Empire’s periphery .

A particular surprise is that there is no evidence of a genetic impact on the Balkans of migrants of Italic descent: “During the Imperial period, we detect an influx of Anatolian ancestry in the Balkans and not that of populations descending from the people of Italy,” says Íñigo Olalde, Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and co-lead author of the study .

“These Anatolians were intensively integrated into local society. At Viminacium, for example, there is an exceptionally rich sarcophagus in which we find a man of local descent and a woman of Anatolian descent buried together.”The team also discovered cases of sporadic long-distance mobility from far-away regions, such as an adolescent boy whose ancestral genetic signature belongs to hunter-gatherer populations from the Pontic (Northern Black Sea) steppes and a young woman who seems to have had an East African ancestor, both of whom were buried together at Viminacium .

This research underscores the shared demographic history across the Balkans and highlights the profound impact of Anatolian and Slavic migrations during and after the Roman Empire.