How much impact did slavery have on ancient gene pools in Europe ?

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I have long wondered how much of the modern Italian and Greek population descend from slaves imported from other countries. We have no idea at present if their genetic impact was minor (few slaves left descendants), moderate (e.g. 10% or 20% of modern genomes come from foreign slaves) or major (e.g. over half of the modern gene pool was inherited from slaves).

The only evidence we have of how much DNA ancient slaves contributed to modern gene pools is from Iceland. There, it looks like about 20% of male lineages and about 50% of female lineages today came from Irish and Scottish slaves brought by the Vikings. Looking at admixtures, modern Icelandic people are actually closer to the Irish than to the Swedes, so the maternal proportion (very difficult to assess from mtDNA haplogroups) could be even higher than 50%.

How would ancient Greek and Rome compare ? Considering that both the ancient Greeks and Romans relied much more on slaves to run their economy (mines, farms, road building, household work, entertainment), I would expect an even higher proportion.

Of course the Celts also kept slaves, but mostly other enslaves Celtic tribes. The Romans had such a large empire that they brought slaves from a great variety of regions and ethnic groups. The Greeks would have brought slaves mostly from the Balkans, Anatolia and Libya (before the Hellenistic period, at least).

It has been argued that slaves didn't procreate much as they weren't free. But that's nonsense. Slaves were valuable commodities, sold on markets. If you owned slaves, having them breed together created more wealth. So the more children they had the better. Additionally there is now ample evidence that the Romans liked to acquire beautiful female slaves (especially exotic blondes and redheads) for the purpose of sex, and that they often had children with them. These children were typically freed once their reached adolescence or adulthood. In fact, most of the freed slaves in ancient Rome could have been the offspring of Roman patricians with their slaves.

If that is the case, that genetic contribution of slaves wouldn't show up on the Y-DNA line, but nevertheless contributed a big share of the total admixture. However things are surely more complicated as there is a very clear north-south gradient for genetic admixtures in Italy. It is possible that northern Italy imported more slaves from Gaul, Germania, Pannonia and other northern regions, while southern Italy brought more slaves from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. But there is surely more to the story. That's why I am awaiting with great interest any data from ancient Rome and Greece.

It would be very interested to compare the genomes (and Y-DNA) of elite Greeks/Romans vs Greek/Roman slaves, and see the evolution over time. It is very doubtful that the Mycenaean elite was genetically close to the elite of Classical Greece, and I also suspect considerable regional variations between, say, Athens, Sparta, Ionia, etc.
 
I'm not sure if we are going to see any noticeable changes in Greece. Most Greek slaves were from close by regions and genetically very similar to Greeks. I'm always looking forward to ancient samples.
 
I have no idea any more. I used to think that getting ancient dna from the appropriate time periods would provide rather definitive answers, but I'm no longer so sure.

The context in which the remains were found is very important, but also, it seems to me, probably subject to a number of interpretations. A good example of the difficulties can be seen from this paper recently published by Kristina Killgrove.

It's discussed in this Eupedia thread:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...during-the-imperial-era?highlight=slaves+Rome

An isotope analysis was done of the remains, revealing more migration in people buried in areas where the poor were buried compared to the ones where the more well to do were buried. Most of the migration seems to have been from within the peninsula, but one set was from a "hotter", drier, climate.

So far, so good, but how do we know the percentage, or more importantly which specific set of remains were from slaves versus just from the poorer classes? Unless it's a specifically "slave" cemetery, it would be difficult to be definitive in one's conclusions. Were slaves even always buried? How many were just tossed out with the trash? So, there would be some ambiguity as to whether the remains found are representative of the whole period.

Then, of course, there's the fact that isotope analysis gives you only the origin of that particular set of remains. That person could have parents who were born elsewhere.

So, obviously, uniparental dna would be very important. In that regard, though, how would you know if a set of remains from a burial site for the poor carrying, say, R1b, who was from the Alps in terms of isotopes, was a "Celtic" slave, an Italic farmer who moved to Rome for work, or even someone of Italic "background" who sold himself, or was sold into slavery? The same would go for G2a or E-V13. We would need extremely finely resolved ydna analysis, and a better picture than we have at present of the yDna found in all of these groups across a broad span of time. At some point there might be more clarity, but I don't think we're at the point yet where we can be certain of very much.

Autosomal analysis might take us further, but my faith in Admixture analyses is now pretty low, and even formal stats have their problems, as does IBD analysis given the problems with dating.

In general terms, I've read dozens of textbooks and I don't even know how many papers on the subject and there isn't even any agreement as to how many slaves there were in Italy, to use one example, or what their "ethnic" breakdown might have been. We do know there was a big influx after each conquest, but that covers a lot of territory...Gaul, Britain, Spain, Germania, Pannonia, Dacia, Greece, Anatolia (Seleucid Empire) Egypt, Carthage. I would think the slaves from a particular conquest were scattered throughout the Empire, wherever there was the need and the wealth to acquire them. In the earlier stages that probably meant more went to the Italian peninsula, but as time passed I'm sure there were many who became imperial slaves for latifundia, mines, the galleys, business enterprises, and then for the rather international senatorial class.

Also, I don't know why it is nonsense to question whether the majority of slaves had progeny. How long would latifundia or mine or galley slaves have survived? How long did prostitutes last? Educated and highly skilled slaves perhaps, like the highly prized Greek slaves, but the rest? Even for the favored ones, manumission usually came after decades of service. Having a child with one's female slave probably happened, I'm sure, but what percentage of the population was wealthy enough to have lots of slaves. Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen. We have an SSA woman's remains in York, and all indications are that she was well to do, and I'm sure the same sort of thing happened in Rome. We just don't know the scale.

Certainly, there's no indication that the Romans had "slave breeding" farms. We can't just assume they must have existed. Even in the southern U.S., where such disgusting practices did indeed exist, most scholars believe that it was mostly because of the closing down of the slave trade in the early 19th century. Rome, on the other hand, had periodic conquests which kept supply high, and therefore prices low. Also, it's clear that the percentage of the men in the American south who would have been in a position to take advantage of their slaves in this way was very small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States

@LeBrok.

It depends how you're defining ancient Greece. After Alexander, it stretched very far indeed.
dividedgreekempire.gig.gif
 
The slaves weren't imported only from neighbouring areas. I'll repost this.

The first slaves may have been pre-IE or IE-Anatolian or both but that's speculation. During historical times they may have been Greek hostages from other Greek city states or prisoners of war. A form of slave trade must have existed with the Scythians. "Scythian archers" acted as police forces in Athens altough the term 'Scythian" might mean something else here. There were Thacian, Illyrian mercenaries. The Greeks also interacted with the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Persians etc

About Graeco-Scythian slave trade: http://www.pontos.dk/publications/bo..._Gavriljuk.pdf
Possible origin of many foreign slaves (one of many) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoles_culture

If we assume that all pre-proto-Greeks were for example R1b they must have come to Greece through the Balkans. A first admixture might have happened outside of Greece somewhere in the Balkans for example with a E-V13 population and a second admixture might have happened later with a J2 population in southern Greece. Non-indoeuropeans had cultures which may have been more advanced in certain areas, so it's not safe to assume that the pre-proto-Greeks enslaved all the peoples they came across.

They may have left the steppes, for example, at 2800 BC and have entered Greece 800 years later. Many things may happen during 800 years. Mycenean Greek civilization is dated 400 years later. At the time it seems that there were slaves but we don't know their condition, their origines and their number.

Eitherway, I think that the main advantage of Classical Greece was the interaction with other advanced cultures (more advanced in certain arenas), namely the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and maybe some Anatolian IE and non-IE populations.

Herodotus for example had Karian origin so his ancestors spoke Luwian.
 
medieval and renaissance times by Italian trading empires was still going on

the Genoese in Kaffa ( crimea ) took tatar slaves to liguria and barcelona to be sold until 1477

the venetians in Azov took slaves and on-sold them to the visconti's of Milan and even the many german merchants in Venice until 1435
https://books.google.com.au/books?i...v=onepage&q=venetian slaves from Azov&f=false

Even Venetians captains took west-africans to Portugal in the services of the king of Portugal...........like Alvise da Mosto ( read his journals)
 
In Ancient Greek city-states like Athens or Sparta, only a minority of population were free citizens. The majority were either half-free people with some limited rights but not equal status, or unfree slaves. Of course some/many of those could be of local origin, genetically the same as free citizens. So question is how many of them were of foreign origin, and how many were locals. Also - when it comes to those half-free ("second class" or "third class") and unfree people of local origin - I actually wonder if they were genetically more Non-Indo-European (descended to a larger degree from Pre-Greek aboriginals) than the free population? Today in India there are still genetic differences between castes, with Upper Castes having reportedly a higher percent of Indo-European ancestry. Greece - like India - was also seized by Indo-European newcomers, who in both places established themselves as new dominant ruling classes.
 
Well, the first slaves may have been from the local population. Let's assume that the locals were predominately J2 and E-V13. But we cant' be sure that all the let's say.. indigenous population was non-Indoeuropean. A part of them may had been Anatolian Indo-European. So even if all slaves were from non-Greek populations and all proto-Greeks were stereotypically Indo-European in the beginning, it's possible, for example, that a master and his slave belonged to the same Haplogroup (let's say R1b). That probably didn't happen a lot but I say that to avoid possible generalizations of the type "The haplogroups of the slaves were this and that"

It has been proposed that a major source of slaves may have been the Black sea. But the Scythians or the Kolchians who were possibly selling slaves wouldn't sell people from their own people obviously but from their neighbouring tribes and cultures. These tribes might have been Indoeuropean, might not have been.

On Athenian art we have names of potters and painters like Sikelos, Thrax, Kolchos, Skythes, Brygos, Lydos. Someone can assume that they were slaves from Sicily, Thrace, Kolchis, Scythia, Phrygia, Lydia but that's unproveable. Even if they were slaves their name may have signified the place where they were sold and not their origin. But, they may have been immigrants also. Not all craftsmen were slaves. "Metoikoi" were neither citizens nor slaves and some of them were qutite rich especially those involved with trade. Who knows? It's better not to make that kind of assumptions. A little later also, during Hellenistic times a rich metic could purchase citizenship.

I'll restate that one of the major advantages of the Greek civilazation was the interaction with other advanced non-Indoeuropean (the Egyptians, the Phoenicians etc) and Indoeuropean cultures.

I also have to note that I don't necessarily accept the stereotypes fabout the haplogroups of the proto-Indo-Europeans. Because they probably didn't belong to a single culture but to an horizon of cultures and different groups left from the homeland at different times so even if R1b and R1a were the predominant haplogroups, a culture with a partly or mostly different origin may have entered the horizon at some point. Other groups may have accepted them as neighbours because they brought something that they didn't have e.g. advanced knowledge about agriculture or pottery or something else. And from the interaction of the different groups a new culture may have been formed.
 
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I would think the slaves from a particular conquest were scattered throughout the Empire, wherever there was the need and the wealth to acquire them. In the earlier stages that probably meant more went to the Italian peninsula, but as time passed I'm sure there were many who became imperial slaves for latifundia, mines, the galleys, business enterprises, and then for the rather international senatorial class.

That's because you only consider male slaves. Hardly any women worked in mines or in galleys. Women often became either prostitutes or domestic slaves, and they are the ones who would have passed most of the slaves' genes to posterity.

Also, I don't know why it is nonsense to question whether the majority of slaves had progeny. How long would latifundia or mine or galley slaves have survived? How long did prostitutes last? Educated and highly skilled slaves perhaps, like the highly prized Greek slaves, but the rest? Even for the favored ones, manumission usually came after decades of service. Having a child with one's female slave probably happened, I'm sure, but what percentage of the population was wealthy enough to have lots of slaves. Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen. We have an SSA woman's remains in York, and all indications are that she was well to do, and I'm sure the same sort of thing happened in Rome. We just don't know the scale.

Exactly, we don't know the scale, and this is why it is so interesting to study the question by gathering ancient Roman DNA. Too bad that Romans practised cremation and that it won't be easy to get many relevant samples for the elite.
 
One question is, the mythical Danaus, his brother Aegyptus, the Danaids etc were Indo-Europeans? Also did the Greek Indoeuropeans had any knowledge about shipping? They had horses, chariots possibly, some weapons, cattle. What else?

They wouldn't be able to create the civilization they created without coming across to a non Indo-European advanced culture, possibly related to some of the Sea Peoples.
 
We have an SSA woman's remains in York, and all indications are that she was well to do

Yes, she had a comfortable life and was surrounded by luxuries.

We don't know if she was free or a slave, but thinking that being a slave was always terrible is wrong. Many slaves in the Ancient world enjoyed in many respects better lifes than poor classes of free people. For example educated Greeks who worked as teachers of children of rich Romans were usually owned as slaves by those Romans. Gladiators were also slaves by definition, yet we even know instances of people who were volunteering to become gladiators (which meant giving up your personal freedom and becoming a slave). Such gladiator could become a celebrite, and if he won enough fights, he could later regain his personal freedom. On the other hand, forced labourers who worked in Athenian mines had very harsh conditions and very low life expectancy. All of this shows that we should not generalize because differences between various types of slaves were almost as large as between various classes of free population.
 
Well, the first slaves may have been from the local population. Let's assume that the locals were predominately J2 and E-V13. But we cant' be sure that all the let's say.. indigenous population was non-Indoeuropean. A part of them may had been Anatolian Indo-European. So even if all slaves were from non-Greek populations and all proto-Greeks were stereotypically Indo-European in the beginning, it's possible, for example, that a master and his slave belonged to the same Haplogroup (let's say R1b). That probably didn't happen a lot but I say that to avoid possible generalizations of the type "The haplogroups of the slaves were this and that"

It has been proposed that a major source of slaves may have been the Black sea. But the Scythians or the Kolchians who were possibly selling slaves wouldn't sell people from their own people obviously but from their neighbouring tribes and cultures. These tribes might have been Indoeuropean, might not have been.

Would that be like the Afro-American slaves? Most Afro-Americans are E1b1a (Bantu). They were probably captured and sold by other E1b1a tribes.
A lot of them now have European DNA because of masters having children from female slaves.
 
Iceland was uninhabited while Roman empire isn't, for example Roman Italy in the first empire of Augusto had 10-12 millions inhabitants.
 
Iceland was uninhabited while Roman empire isn't, for example Roman Italy in the first empire of Augusto had 10-12 millions inhabitants.


good point - that said, concerning Iceland I'm not sure a part of the Celtic imput among them was not volontary - look at the Gal-Gaedhil or Gaedhil-Gal warriors, mix of Vikings and Irish or Scottish men; the question remains: what % ???
 
So the slaves in Iceland were celts?
 
For the record, I am also interested in assessing the genetic impact of imported slavery in the whole Roman Empire. Reversing the point of view, I think that Roman slave masters living outside of Italy would also have spread their genes relatively fast by impregnating their female house slaves, thus spreading Roman Y-chromosomes (R1b-U152, J2 and E-M34 being the three more common Roman patrician haplogroups, IMHO) around the empire, and particularly in Gaul, southern England, Iberia and Grece where the ethnic Roman citizens migrated in the largest number (judging by the number of Roman colonies and farms).

500px-Romancoloniae.jpg



The case of African-American slaves can also help us estimate how frequent it was for slave masters to have children with their female slaves. I couldn't find much data on African-American Y-DNA. The Black Belt of Alabama DNA Project has over 400 members from all the former Confederate states, and among them only about 150 carry African Y-DNA (haplogroups A, B, E-M2). So this data suggests that over 60% of the African-American lineages are of European origin. That's huge considering, but relatively consistent with the 23andMe study (Bryc et al. 2014), which found that an average African-American has 24% of European DNA in his/her genome. Since Y-DNA only represents the paternal side, it is normal to find that the genome-wide impact is less than half. It would be exactly half looking at the first generation of hyrbids. But there is a good chance that these half-White slaves became freed more frequently (as was the case with Thomas Jefferson's children), prospered more in American society and consequently also left more descendant themselves with Black slaves, thus diluting their European genes again.

The Romans were not encumbered with Christian values and taboos (at least not until the 4th century) and were known for their promiscuity. In the 1st century Roman wives would typically allow their husbands to have sex with slaves and prostitutes, and some would even buy beautiful slaves for their husbands. It was clearly a very different culture from the Christian and post-Christian ones. That could also mean that a sizeable percentage of Western European men who carry Roman Y-chromosomes descend from master-slave relationships. Anyway all of us descend from ancient slaves. Whether slaves's children represented 5% or 50% of all the births between the Bronze Age and the Roman Empire, slavery lasted for so long and genes have mixed so much since then that statistically it is impossible that anyone doesn't have (millions of) slaves in their ancestors.
 
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@Maciamo

what about the Legionairies?
at that time behind 2-3 legionairies there was a "woman", wine sellers, gamblers, merchants etc.
so in many places we consider as Roman, majority coulb be non Romans, but Roman citizens.
 
@Maciamo

what about the Legionairies?
at that time behind 2-3 legionairies there was a "woman", wine sellers, gamblers, merchants etc.
so in many places we consider as Roman, majority coulb be non Romans, but Roman citizens.

I think that slave masters left far more illegitimate children than legionaries. That's because slave masters typically had many female slaves for one man, while legionaries shared prostitutes.

Slave girls would accept pregnancies from their master because 1) they didn't have the choice and 2) carrying the master's offspring would generally lead to better conditions for the mother as well, and perhaps even being freed. Rich masters would feed and take good care of their children with slaves, and so their progeny survived to adulthood and normally had children themselves too.

Prostitutes serving legionaries tried to avoid at all costs getting pregnant, as prostitutes have always done, because it's bad for business (can't work while pregnant) and since prostitutes came from poor backgrounds, they couldn't afford to feed children. So even if they got pregnant, they would either have an abortion or kill/abandon the baby at birth. That's just the way it was.

Likewise raped girls in conquered regions would often abort, abandon the baby, or even commit suicide in some cases. Very few would take care of a child of rape on their own. It's very different from the situation of Bronze Age Indo-European kings taking dozens of women from conquered lands into their harems (à la Genghis Khan) and taking care of their offspring with them.

Anyway military conquests and chances of rapes for legionaries were short-lived, while master-slave relationships happened on a daily basis for most of a slave's lifetime. So a master had hundreds of opportunities to impregnate his female slaves, while soldiers only got one shot with rapes (which did not necessarily coincide with the fertile period of the month anyway).

So statistically, slave masters were at least 100 times more likely to leave descendants that reached adulthood than legionaries through prostitutes and occasional rapes.
 
But from the society of Pompei we see that prostitudes were considered more elite than slaves,
and 'adultery' with slaves inside the house was crime for Roman society and punished by law.
from Pompei we know that rich Romans had the 'woman' there, and the wife at Rome,
besides although it was unspeakable for a Roman lady, they also had a slave, cause most Roman marriages were done due to 'political bargains'
we know that many of them might slept with their husband few times.
'wolfs den' was the most central house at Pompei,
besides Romans used to marry their slaves among them, although that could be to throw ashes.

the prices of silphium σιλφιον are well known.
Romans and Greek knew SIlphium, they colonise Cyrene.
Phoenicians and Minoans merchant it.
and I ask which Roman who could afford a slave, would not buy a few grams in order to avoid scandal,
on controversary where you could find silphium outside Cyrene and Roman elite?
I mean which is more easy,
1) to have a 'slave' and give her silphium, to avoid scandal in the Roman society?
2) to hide her at Pompei and feed her and the kid, with a possible reveal which could be even lethal.

but could Legionairies afford silphium?
 
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But from the society of Pompei we see that prostitudes were considered more elite than slaves,
and 'adultery' with slaves inside the house was crime for Roman society and punished by law.
from Pompei we know that rich Romans had the 'woman' there, and the wife at Rome,
besides although it was unspeakable for a Roman lady, they also had a slave, cause most Roman marriages were done due to 'political bargains'
we know that many of them might slept with their husband few times.

We seem to have different sources. Here is an excerpt from Matt Ridley's amazing book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (pages 200-201):

"Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending, from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses: Julius Caesar's affairs with women were"commonly described as extravagant" (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote, "The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for deflowering girls—who were collected for him by his wife:" Tiberius's "criminal lusts" were "worthy of an oriental tyrant" (Tacitus). Caligula "made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome" (Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him "sundry housemaids to lie with" (Dio) : When Nero floated down the Tiber, he "had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore"(Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.
[...]
"Ordinary" Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves: Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth: Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not: If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller: And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth: The unrestricted sexual availability of slaves "is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it.

Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth.
This cannot have been an economically sensible decision: Freed slaves became rich and numerous: Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most slaves who were freed had been born in their masters' homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely freed. There seems little doubt that Roman nobles were freeing their illegitimate sons, bred of female slaves."
 

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