28/07/2025 - The Roman Empire forged a vast and interconnected world, extending from Britain to the Euphrates. As imperial power shifted and evolved—from the unified Roman state to the eastern-focused Byzantine Empire—so too did the people who inhabited its heartlands. Recent ancient DNA studies reveal a deep genetic footprint of Anatolian and Middle Eastern ancestry in Italy, most visible during the Roman Imperial period and under Byzantine rule in the south.
This eastern connection was not fleeting. It shaped the genetic legacy of Italy, especially in Calabria, Apulia, and the Campanian coast, areas that remained linked to Constantinople well into the Middle Ages.
1. Imperial Rome: An Empire of Migrants
The groundbreaking study by Antonio et al. (2019)
(Science, aay6826) analyzed ge...See more
17/07/2025 - In the silence of a 5th-century cemetery in Angers, in the heart of what is now western France, a man was buried. More than a millennium later, he would be given the code name FRA009, and his DNA would tell an unexpected story—a story that stretches across the Mediterranean, from North Africa to the Loire Valley.
Sequenced as part of a large-scale study of French genetic history published in Nature Communications (2024), FRA009 stood out as an anomaly. While all other medieval individuals clustered genetically with modern or ancient western Europeans, FRA009 showed a strong affinity with present-day North Africans. His mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, as well as his Y-chromosome haplogroup E-FTG24236, all point to a recent North African origin, making him a rare and precious witness o...See more
07/07/2025 - The Iberian Peninsula—today’s Spain and Portugal—has long been a meeting point of diverse peoples and cultures from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Recent ancient DNA studies have revolutionized our understanding of its population history, revealing waves of migration, mixing, and adaptation over thousands of years.
From the first hunter-gatherers to the Bronze Age migrations, the Roman Empire, and the medieval kingdoms, Iberia’s genetic landscape reflects a complex story of continuity and transformation. Let’s take a tour through this fascinating journey, uncovering how science is illuminating the many layers of Iberian ancestry.
1. The Deepest Layers: Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry
The earliest inhabitants of Iberia were Late Pleistocene and early Holoce...See more
21/06/2025 - The edges of the Roman Empire were never barren limits. They were dynamic zones of exchange, settlement, and transformation. Thanks to archaeogenetics, we now have the tools to explore these liminal spaces through the DNA of those who lived and died there. Three recent studies—from Valkenburg (South Holland), Sint-Truiden (Belgium), and a broad survey across Europe—offer new insights into the ancestry and mobility of Roman frontier populations. When combined with genetic data from Merovingian-era cemeteries, a fascinating story emerges: one of continuity, integration, and transition.
I. Valkenburg: A Cosmopolitan Outpost
The Roman military cemetery at Valkenburg, explored in the 2024 study by van Duijvenbode et al. (bioRxiv), presents a diverse genetic landscape. Most mal...See more
16/06/2025 - Vahaduo is one of the most powerful online tools to explore your deep ancestry using G25 coordinates — a set of principal components developed by Davidski from the Eurogenes project. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to use Vahaduo to model your ancestry in just a few simple steps.
What You Need Before You Start
Your G25 coordinates (target)
A list of reference samples (sources) in G25 format
Access to Vahaduo
Step 1: Open the Right Vahaduo Tool
Go to https://vahaduo.github.io/vahaduo/.
Step 2: Paste Your Target Coordinates
Here are two examples you can use as target individuals:
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individual1_scaled,0.119514,0.111708,0.05242,0.025194,0.026466,0.007251,-0.020446,-0.024461,0.008385,0.006743,-0.000812,0.002398,-0.005798,-0.0035...See more
