What happened after the fall of Rome? Ancient genomes offer new clues

A genomic analysis of people buried on the frontier of the ancient Roman Empire shows how distinct groups combined after the empire’s fall.

By Emma Gomez edited by Claire Cameron

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When the Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE, Europe was thrown into chaos as Germanic barbarian forces advanced south – or so the story goes. But a new study shows that some communities on the continent have actually coalesced, becoming more cosmopolitan and more diverse.

“Traditionally, all of history … was seen as a clash of civilizations between the Germanic hordes to the north and the Roman Empire to the south,” explains Joachim Burger, an anthropologist and population geneticist at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. But Burger and his colleagues showed the opposite: in a new study published today in Naturethey found that “it’s actually more of a story of peaceful integration,” he says.

Researchers analyzed human remains at various burial sites in Germany and determined that two genetically distinct groups of people – a settlement of ancient Roman soldiers and a neighboring group of people of northern European descent – ​​intermarried and developed a common culture, including a common method of burial, after the fall of Rome in 476 CE.

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Researchers analyzed 258 ancient genomes collected from tombs on the border of the Roman Empire in what is now southern Germany and dating from between 400 and 660 CE. They compared them to a reference set of other ancient and modern genomes and revealed that ancient Roman soldiers, who carried with them a mixture of DNA from Italy, southeastern Europe and the Balkans, traveled to villages on the empire’s frontier where people with DNA from areas including what is now northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands lived. The oldest genomes from the burial sites suggest that these two groups did not mix much before the fall of Rome. But after that time they did, with the mixed families being buried together.

These later burials are called row grave cemeteries because the graves were perfectly parallel to each other. This practice began among communities of Norse ancestry, but became the norm after the two communities came together. Burial sites also include features that suggest a strong emphasis on monogamy and the nuclear family. And researchers say these practices, like parents being buried together, likely came from Roman culture.

“At the time, this was a completely unique and new model, developed in late Roman society and even codified in laws,” says Burger. “But now we see it… in an early medieval, presumably Germanic, society. So Late Antiquity is not really over; it is simply transforming into a new society, less urban and more agricultural.”

“It was really a very restricted kinship group,” says Toomas Kivisild, professor of human evolutionary genetics at the Catholic University of Louvain (KU Leuven) in Belgium, who was not involved in the study. Other post-Roman communities in Europe, such as England, do not show such closeness between families, he says. “The intensity of kinship in these cemeteries is much less intense than in [these new findings].”