The end of Rome supposedly came as suddenly as thunder, relative to history’s long arc.
The legions withdraw from their frontiers, opening the door to the barbarian hoards descending from the misty north, a tide of blond warriors rolling across the Rhine and Danube, trampling villas, cities, and laws beneath their leather or bare feet. Both in schoolbooks and popular imagination, 476 AD stands like a sword stroke: the year Romulus Augustulus, the teenage emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by the barbarian general Odoacer, and the Roman world gave way to the Dark Ages.
But the DNA from that period in southern Germany suggests the late Roman world was not swiftly overrun by barbarian tribes. Instead, the genetic evidence points to a slow and gradual shift that occurred through small-scale intermarriage between locals and newcomers.
In row after row of early medieval graves, beneath jewelry, weapons, clothing clasps, and the bones of families buried close together, researchers have found not the mark of a sudden conquest, but the traces of neighbors becoming kin. The analysis of 258 ancient genomes from cemeteries along Rome’s old northern frontier suggests that the collapse of imperial power did not unleash a vast barbarian replacement. Instead, it loosened the structures that had kept people apart, leading to a genetic melting pot in Europe. But the pot was slow-cooked.
Remarkably, something recognizably European began to take shape.
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