Estonian Biocentre, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu Tartu 51010, Estonia.
St John's College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK.
Mol Biol Evol. 2024 Sep 4;41(9). doi: 10.1093/molbev/msae168.
The Roman period saw the empire expand across Europe and the Mediterranean, including much of what is today Great Britain. While there is written evidence of high mobility into and out of Britain for administrators, traders, and the military, the impact of imperialism on local, rural population structure, kinship, and mobility is invisible in the textual record. The extent of genetic change that occurred in Britain during the Roman military occupation remains underexplored. Here, using genome-wide data from 52 ancient individuals from eight sites in Cambridgeshire covering the period of Roman occupation, we show low levels of genetic ancestry differentiation between Romano-British sites and indications of larger populations than in the Bronze Age and Neolithic. We find no evidence of long-distance migration from elsewhere in the Empire, though we do find one case of possible temporary mobility within a family unit during the Late Romano-British period. We also show that the present-day patterns of genetic ancestry composition in Britain emerged after the Roman period.
罗马时期，帝国版图横跨欧洲和地中海，包括今天的大不列颠岛的大部分地区。虽然有书面证据表明行政人员、商人和军人在英国境内和境外有很高的流动性，但帝国对当地农村人口结构、亲属关系和流动性的影响在文字记录中是看不见的。在罗马军事占领期间，英国发生的遗传变化程度仍未得到充分探索。在这里，我们使用来自剑桥郡 8 个地点的 52 个古代个体的全基因组数据，对罗马占领时期进行了研究，结果表明，罗马时期英国遗址之间的遗传祖先分化程度较低，并且表明人口数量比青铜时代和新石器时代更大。我们没有发现从帝国其他地方长途迁徙的证据，尽管我们确实在罗马后期的一个家庭单位中发现了一个可能的临时流动案例。我们还表明，英国目前的遗传祖先成分模式是在罗马时期之后出现的。
