by A man born 2,000 years ago in Russia ended up buried in England – and researchers think they have finally figured out how, thanks to DNA.
Scientists from the Francis Crick Institute of London, Durham University in England, and MOLA Headland Infrastructure, a consortium of two archaeological companies in the United Kingdom, worked together to determine the global trotting history of a skeleton discovered in 2017.
The remains, found during the excavation of the MOLA District infrastructure in Cambridgeshire, were buried near a farmstead in the countryside. However, the man, known as Offord Cluny 203645, may have come from thousands of miles away, the scientists said in research published in Current Biology.
The DNA analysis was carried out as part of a project on ancient genomes in Great Britain, led by the ancient genomics laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. Marina Soares de Silva, a postdoctoral fellow conducting research in the lab, said in a news release from the institute that she and her fellow researchers “started by extracting and sequencing ancient DNA from the human inner ear bone,” noting that it was that’s the. a spot that was best preserved. Ancient DNA is “very fragmented and damaged,” Soares de Silva said, but the team “was able to sequence a lot of their DNA to get good quality,” and compare it to other samples of ancient individuals.
“The first thing we saw was that he was genetically different from the other Romano-British individuals studied so far,” said Soares de Silva. “In fact, our analysis showed that it shared a common ancestor with previously studied individuals from the Caucasian and Sarmatian groups.”
The Sarmatians were Iranian-speaking nomads and renowned horse riders who lived in the area that would become present-day southern Russia and Ukraine, according to the release.
However, DNA testing alone could not confirm where the man was born, as his parents may have moved to the area before he was born. Researchers began to focus on other types of analysis, and soon, experts from the Department of Archeology at Durham University were analyzing isotopes from the man’s teeth to see where he grew up and how his diet might have changed with during his life.
Those researchers found that the man “lived in an arid location in the eastern part of the European continent” until he was 5 or 6, according to Janet Montgomery, a professor at the university. His diet at that age focused on crops like “millet and sorghum, which are not native to Europe,” Montgomery said.
As man grew, “he retreated, and these plants disappeared from his diet,” Montgomery said. His diet changed again around the age of nine, suggesting that he moved into South Eastern or Central Europe as a child before arriving in Britain and died somewhere between 18 and 25 years of age .
Researchers have had multiple theories on how man moved to Europe. One theory relates to a battle from 175 AD, when the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius defeated a Sarmatian army on the north-eastern border of the empire. He put the cavalry into his legions and sent some of them to Britain, so that the man could move with them when he was a child. Alex Smith, ex-excavation manager for MOLA Headland Infrastructure, said this theory “concerns previous burial evidence from Britain which suggests that entire families may have been part of the 5500 members of the Sarmatian horsemen sent by Marcus Aurelius to Britain.”
“Did this young man grow up to be part of this cavalry unit? We can’t say, because we don’t have any finds or objects from his grave that connect him to the Roman army, or to the Sarmatians,” said Smith . . “In general, we have very limited evidence for the Sarmatians settling in Britain. We know that they were probably on Hadrian’s Wall, and at Catterick in North Yorkshire, but they may have been spread across the country . If this young man had been part of the cavalry, then he might have died on the way to a military position.”
Long-distance travel was also common during this period, which may have caused the man to move for his own reasons. The effects of such movements were often seen in “cities or military locations,” according to Tom Booth, a senior laboratory research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, but the man moved from one rural area to another, showing a new type of travel. .
“It has previously been argued that Roman rule did not have a major impact on rural life – but this shows a clear impact in rural areas,” said Booth.
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