People in the south of England ‘might be descended from Romans’

The marks of Roman civilisation are everywhere in Britain – from the relics of the invaders’ famously straight roads, to the names of places such as London.

But could the Romans, who occupied Britain from 43AD until 410AD have left a more lasting legacy?

A new study aims to use DNA from ancient skeletons to find out if people in the south of England are descended from Roman soldiers, the Telegraph reports.

DNA evidence shows that groups in the south-east mixed with a new population, and one possibility is that it could be the Romans, says Harvard’s Professor David Reich.

Reich has begun sampling 1,000 ancient skeletons to find out.

Reich says, ‘We see changed in ancestry in the south-east of Britain by the Roman period compared to 1000 years before.

‘This means that there must have been admixture into south-eastern Britain in the Iron Age or Roman period that did not affect the North to the same extent.

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‘However, we don’t know the details of how this occurred and several explanations are possible.We are just starting out on this project.’

Reich’s previous studies of the ‘Bell Beaker’ people upended an idea which many researchers believed – that immigration was a relatively rare event in human history.

The Beaker People almost entirely replaced the earlier Britons who built Stonehenge.

It’s an idea which populist politicians like to play on – the idea that present-day people are descended from a population which ‘always’ lived in the same area.

But it’s almost always wrong, according to analysis of ancient DNA.
‘There was a view that migration is a very rare process in human evolution,’ says Reich

‘The orthodoxy – the assumption that present-day people are directly descended from the people who always lived in that same area — is wrong almost everywhere.’