DNA Just Exposed Where Italians Actually Came From

DNA Just Exposed Where Italians Actually Came From An Imperial Roman, buried in the city at the height of its power, was in his genes about as Near Eastern as he was European. That is not a metaphor. When Margaret Antonio and Jonathan Pritchard sequenced a hundred and twenty-seven ancient genomes from around Rome, the people interred under the empire looked less like their own Iron Age grandparents and more like contemporaries from Syria, Lebanon and western Anatolia. Within three hundred years, the gap between an Imperial and an Iron Age Roman had grown as wide as the distance between two separate modern nations. The part that quietly detonates the whole tidy story is that Rome built an eternal city but never an eternal people. And Rome is only one of five complete genetic rewrites the peninsula has been through in twelve thousand years, the foragers replaced by Anatolian farmers, the farmers reshaped by steppe herders, the empire pulling the East westward, then the Lombards crossing the Alps with their families in tow. Modern Italy holds the most internal genetic structure of any country in Europe, and Sardinia still carries Stone Age farmers in its blood. Stay for the question this raises about every origin story a nation has ever told itself.