2,000 Year-Old Global Economy?!?

In an interesting stroke of symmetry...

On February 5th, I posted about a 2,000 year-old skeleton unearthed in Mongolia (link here) that had "western" DNA.

Now today, I'm going to link you to a unique set of bones, found at the Roman Vagnari site (see S. Illinois Carb link below), which has "eastern asian" DNA.

The Independent (online) writes:

A team of researchers announced a surprising discovery during a scholarly presentation in Toronto last Friday. The research team, based at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, has been helping to excavate an ancient Roman cemetery at the site of Vagnari in southern Italy. Led by Professor Tracy Prowse, they’ve been analyzing the skeletons found there by performing DNA and oxygen isotope tests.

The surprise is that the DNA tests show that one of the skeletons, a man, has an East Asian ancestry – on his mother’s side. This appears to be the first time that a skeleton with an East Asian ancestry has been discovered in the Roman Empire.

Nick Squires for the UK.Telegraph explains:

The skeleton was excavated from a cemetery which formed part of an imperial Roman estate at Vagnari, in the province Puglia, which forms the heel of the Italian boot.

"This discovery poses many questions about globalisation and the movement of people in Roman times," said the team's leader, Tracy Prowse, from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

"Our data reveals that some of the inhabitants of Vagnari came from far outside the confines of the Roman Empire," Prof Prowse told the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

There is, of course, not enough data to really question the assertion that the empires knew very little of each other.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

TheIndependent

Telegraph.UK.co

Here's the team hard at work!