roman conquest of gaul

Ailchu

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Hi everyone

I already posted this somewhere else but this might be the better place for this. I recently stumbled over this article:One-million-Brits-descended-from-Romans on the site telegraph. (sadly i cant post post the link)
which suggests that at leas 1 million british men have a roman Y-dna. Now if you look at the population of england today (53 million) isnt that quite a lot? doesnt that mean that, if we assume every family, no matter if roman or native, had the same amount of children on average the last 1000 years that at least every fiftieth briton women back then who had children during roman occupation had them with a roman? Or is it at least every 25th if we assume that only half of the population is male? And if we consider the big immigration of germanic saxons and angles the number could in reality be even higher because some roman Ys were replaced by germanic ones?

I also wonder how it looks in todays france. does anyone know of studies in france?
 
Hi everyone

I already posted this somewhere else but this might be the better place for this. I recently stumbled over this article:One-million-Brits-descended-from-Romans on the site telegraph. (sadly i cant post post the link)
which suggests that at leas 1 million british men have a roman Y-dna. Now if you look at the population of england today (53 million) isnt that quite a lot? doesnt that mean that, if we assume every family, no matter if roman or native, had the same amount of children on average the last 1000 years that at least every fiftieth briton women back then who had children during roman occupation had them with a roman? Or is it at least every 25th if we assume that only half of the population is male? And if we consider the big immigration of germanic saxons and angles the number could in reality be even higher because some roman Ys were replaced by germanic ones?

I also wonder how it looks in todays france. does anyone know of studies in france?

Well, I'm afraid the Romans might be responsible, at least in England, for more lineages than that article mentions. It could be possible that about 1 in 15 English men might be their direct descendants, and that about 30% of all autosomal genes today in England and Wales were brought by newcomers from the rest of the empire (see here). Of course, the Normans came too and the Anglo-Saxons must have replaced many previous lineages.

Anyway, in France it could not have been too different. Overall, there should be more Roman lineages in France than in Britain. On one hand, ancient Gaul wasn't such an isolated province as Britain was. On the other, there was a significantly smaller military presence there (the retiring legionnaires must have been a key source of many paternal lineages, as they forged families, commonly remaining in the regions they were deployed). It also stayed a little longer in the Empire. Gaul too was invaded and settled by barbarians like Franks, Huns or Goths. From them, it was the Franks who have had the strongest impact, although their legacy wasn't as big as the one Saxons left in Britain. Each group was apparently more successful in certain regions.
 
Could some of these simply be the descendants of Neolithic migrant farming populations? In other words, how do we know for certain that these modern British men are directly descended from Roman soldiers/merchants? How do we know these so-called Roman lineages in Britain do not in fact pre-date Roman conquest?
 
Could some of these simply be the descendants of Neolithic migrant farming populations? In other words, how do we know for certain that these modern British men are directly descended from Roman soldiers/merchants? How do we know these so-called Roman lineages in Britain do not in fact pre-date Roman conquest?

It is said here at "Romans": http://www.eupedia.com/genetics/britain_ireland_dna.shtml

It's true that the Hinxton samples mentioned were quite small but that's what we have, at least so far.
 
but how could the romans achieve something like this? wouldn't a complete replacement of the male population with romans give you 50% roman autosomal DNA? 30% are not far away from that. How was this possible?
maybe the romans killed all the men in their battles? if we look at the gallic war there were at least 1mil deaths out of 6 mil. most of them were probably men. and at least another million was enslaved. probably many women but also men. but there still would have been a big roman migration, repeated mass rapes or soemthing else to explain these high numbers.
 
What do you mean by "Roman"?

The Roman legions in Britain, Gaul and elsewhere were multi-ethnic, with Italians few after Hadrian's time.
 
If you are interested in "Romans" in Great Britain and ancient DNA... check out this paper called Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10326

I am related to both 3drif-16 and 6drif-3 on the Y-chromosome - they are both under U106 and Z156 etc. I share several more SNPs with 6drif-3 ;).
 
I found the Telegraph article. This is a direct quotation:

"A genetic study of five thousand people found that up to four million men in England and Wales carry distinctive genetic signatures which are most commonly found, and likely have their origin, in Italy."

The article admits that it's impossible to tell for certain whether these traits have been inherited from Romans or not, but then goes on to say "researchers" believe that at least a quarter of it came from Roman occupation.
 
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with roman i mean people of the roman empire that were not native to britain. And thanks for the article Bollox79.
 
with roman i mean people of the roman empire that were not native to britain. And thanks for the article Bollox79.

Cheers! It's interesting to note that in modern day samples of both the DF98 group under U106 (of which 6drif-3 was positive for) and DF96 under U106/brother clade to DF98 (of which 3drif-16 was positive for) have their highest amount of clustering/percentage along the Rhine and in the Low Countries... other than Great Britain ;). The main question is when did they get to Great Britain? Before the Romans, or with the Romans?

Also here is the site that did the digging of the Driffield Terrace skeletons: aka the "headless gladiators" http://www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/resources/finding-the-future/gladiators/

See Dr. Iain McDonald's pdf on the DF98 sub group of U106 and Z156 called the "King's Cluster" because it contains the House of Wettin and their descendants in the Isles ;). http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~mcdonald/genetics/kings-cluster.pdf


 
how do we know for certain that these modern British men are directly descended from Roman soldiers/merchants?

There's no way to know but the media doesn't care. Never trust science related articles in the media. They treat hypothesize as fact because it is sensational. Because Romans shared a lot of Y DNA with people surrounding Britain, there's really no way to know what's a Roman lineage and what isn't.
 
Autosomal DNA confirms that modern British aren't to a large extent of Italian Roman decent(if we assume Romans were like modern Italians). Since we have DNA from Bronze/Iron age Scandinavia and Ireland and Britain, we know modern British are basically only descended from BA/IA Northern Europeans. Unlike Irish, interestingly they do have sometype of ancestry pulling them towards Southern Europe, that ancestry could be French it could Spanish it could be Italian it could be a lot of things.
 
Of course that not all Romans who came to Britain were from Italy, just as not all of them were men. They could have come from any province. You don't need a genocide to replace so many genes. After all, there were some 350 years during which Britain belonged to Rome. Besides the military, there must have been a constant influx of merchants and slaves too. Needless to say that many native Britons also would have regularly moved from the island to the rest of the empire, never coming back.
 
with roman i mean people of the roman empire that were not native to britain.

Then the question becomes: how do you define "native to Britain"? The original inhabitants were most likely Neanderthal, followed by hunter-gatherers, followed by neolithic farmers, followed perhaps by Celts or proto-Celts, etc. In other words, there's really no such thing as "native to Britain"--at least not in this sense. The British--like all people--are a mixture of many different groups of people interbreeding over millennia.
 
Then the question becomes: how do you define "native to Britain"? The original inhabitants were most likely Neanderthal, followed by hunter-gatherers, followed by neolithic farmers, followed perhaps by Celts or proto-Celts, etc. In other words, there's really no such thing as "native to Britain"--at least not in this sense. The British--like all people--are a mixture of many different groups of people interbreeding over millennia.
 
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Then the question becomes: how do you define "native to Britain"? The original inhabitants were most likely Neanderthal, followed by hunter-gatherers, followed by neolithic farmers, followed perhaps by Celts or proto-Celts, etc. In other words, there's really no such thing as "native to Britain"--at least not in this sense. The British--like all people--are a mixture of many different groups of people interbreeding over millennia.
that may be. but the distribution of haplogroups and autosomal dna was or is still different in britain and other roman regions. a change in these distributions after the roman conquest would have to come from migrations of people that were not living there before the romans. that's what i meant with native. the people who lived there before the romans. if we talk about native americans we mean the people who lived in america before the europeans invaded.
or else there would be no use for the word native since noone would be. everyone first has to come from somewhere before he can enter a new place. with your argumentation the only native thing on this planet would maybe be some molecule in the primordial soup.
 

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