Slashdot Mirror
DNA to Test Theory of Roman Village in China
Reverse Gear writes "Many of the inhabitants of a lonely village in north western China seems to have distinctive western features. An old theory from the 50s suggests that a Roman legion lost in what is now Iran in the year 53BC lost their commanding officer. They traveled east, so the legend goes, working as mercenaries until they were caught by the Chinese 17 years later. The Chinese described them as using a 'fish-scale formation', which could be a reference to the well-known Roman phalanx technique called the 'tortoise'. The remainder of the legion, it is suggested, may have intermarried with the villagers in Liqian. Scientists are now trying to verify the fascinating theory by testing the DNA of the inhabitants of the Chinese village."
... then they got lost in China!
When in Rome, do as the Romans...go to China?
Hmm could these have been the first Italians to eat noodles?
Or perhaps the first westerners to catch yellow fever?
Either way, I for one welcome our [ancient] lost Roman overlords.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
The village is now overlooked by a pillared portico, in the hope of attracting tourists.
God damn Romulans!!!!!!111!!!
The great roman empire has set it's limb on China, it seems.
Strikingly well preserved mummies from the Takla Makan desert region have strongly European characterstics such as red hair and blue eyes dating from as far back as 3800 BP. DNA analysis on these mummies indicates Indo/European origin. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/chinamum/taklamakan.h tml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Yeah, but that proves little; Taklamakan is a Soft Place. Those guys could have wandered back from 6000 AD for all we know, stopping for a picnic with Fiddler's Green along the way.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If proven, then the theory that Marco Polo brought spaghetti to Italy will finally have some competition. Were noodles, in fact, a Roman invention introduced to the Chinese? (Anyone having been to Xinjiang Province in western China will note the striking similarity between the wheat noodles there with Italian spaghetti).
From TFA...
Gu Jianming, who lives near Liqian, said he was surprised to be told he might be descended from a European imperial army. But the birth of his daughter was also a surprise. Gu Meina, now six, was born with a shock of blonde hair.
If my wife gave birth to a half Chinese baby and told me that it was descended from an ancient lost tribe of Chinese settlers, I might be somewhat suspicious. Gu Jianming, wake up man, she cheated on you... My guess it is with the blond guy you saw in the village about 9 months ago!
AFAY DNA testing is made against 13 well identified DNA sequences with low rate of corruption. It is done on DNA from two individuals, to see if they can belong to the same genetic tree.
Given that at each generation each sequence has 50% probability to be passed on, in n generations the probability of having at least one original gene is 1-(1-2^-n)^13.
If I am not wrong, this gives 34% probability of having 1 gene left after 5 generations; in 10 generations it's about 1%.
I strongly laughed when a biologist friend told me this, just after seeing Da Vinci Code...
OTOH maybe we are not talking of the same test, the article doesn't explain.
Wouldn't that assume substantial mixing with a larger gene pool? If there's little mixing then it wouldn't be surprising if the genetic propensity to, for example, have "big noses" -- thanks a lot to the Chinese for that joke at the expense of us Westerners! -- might well be inherited since it would come not from *one* ancestor but *many*.
_ genealogy
But I suspect they will be looking at the Y-Chromosome, which is inherited in the direct male line. So there you have a single thread going right back. It's where I would start. If there's a possibility this population descends in part from foreign soldiers, the direct male line seems the place to look first.
http://www.le.ac.uk/genetics/maj4/project.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_chromosome#Genetic
to go for a take out - dontcha think?
mummies from the Takla Makan desert region have strongly European characterstics such as red hair and blue eyes
Commenting on the discovery, Professor Cartman said "These people - the Gingers - were the chosen race but with their red hair, freckles, and pale skin they obviously could not stand the sun."
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
True. I remember watching a documentation on ancient Greek stories and myths about the Amazons (no, not the company).
While trying to hunt down the Amazons origins, they visited some nomads somewhere in China (or Mongolia, can't remember where exactly) and took DNA samples of a blonde 10 or 12 year old girl with distinct Caucasian features -- although her mother had none of these whatsoever.
Lo and behold, her DNA (and her mothers!) was identical to DNA samples taken from an Amazon mummy of something like a warrior-priestess found in what is nowadays Ukraine.
Meaning, the girl was a direct descendant of that woman who lived around 2,000 years ago.
What if none of the Romans got busy with the Chinese women?
If the Egyptians (could have) sailed to South America and the Africans (could have) reached Australia and NZ, then this is really nothing compared to that.
It does, however, bring up the issue of the Chinese ego, which is already big as it is. Before you know it they will claim to all being decendents of Caeser or something.
My ancestry is from that region of China. Now I know why I failed Math.
slide #7 features a young girl with semi-blond hair, and #10 is a close-up of an older man with green-hazel eyes.
THE LOST LEGION
The battle of Carrhae ended 53 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, in the last day of the month of may, with a shameful disaster for the Roman army. Seven legions having the strength of 45,000 soldiers were humiliated and routed by 10,000 Parthian archers. Carrhae, an ancient biblical city now known as Harran, is located on Turkey's oriental border. The commanding officer of this unfortunate expedition was Marcus Licinius Crassus, a 62 years old tribune who had organized that campaign eager to gain glory and wealth, even though he was already one of the most rich and powerful men in Rome. Perhaps he did it just because he envied the military successes of Pompeius Magnus and Caesar, and foolishly thought that he may equal them, even though Pompeius Magnus and Caesar were war professionals while Crassus was a mere amateur. His only triumph had been the bloody defeat of Spartacus, but achieved with Pompeius' help: in fact he had too little experience and genius to embark on a large-scale operation abroad.
The Republican government loathed to let him depart with such a sizeable army as there was no real emergency in the east, but Crassus eventually enlisted the support of Pompeius Magnus and Caesar, who did not fail to see the opportunity to free themselves of a powerful competitor whilst waiting to settle the score with each other. During the hot public debate in the Senate a tribunus plebis named Ateius attempted to stop him. Plutarcus writes that, when he realised that his efforts were in vain and that he would not receive enough supporting votes, he lit a brazier and, while throwing grains of incense into the flames, started to curse Crassus and evoke the infernal gods. Judging from the name and the behaviour of this man, we can guess that he was of Etruscan descent. Some metropolitan legions grouped in Rome and marched through Campania and then met at Brindisi with the others coming up from Calabria and then left in spite of the stormy sea. Not all the ships reached the other shore. Crassus had fortune, the blind goddess, on his side during his youth: he came out unscathed from the civil wars; then was implicated in the Catiline conspiracy but bore no consequences; he paid the debts of a spendthrift Caesar whilst being tightfisted himself and with his family. But things had changed and while aging he became a blunderer, making mistakes which were numerous and serious. For instance, in a speech to his soldiers he proclaimed that he would destroy a bridge "so that none of you will be able to return". Noticing their dismayed expression, Crassus corrected himself by explaining that he was referring to the enemy, not his own soldiers. He ordered the distribution of lentils and salt to the troops, oblivious of the fact that this was the meal offered at funerals. The worst possible omen occurred when Crassus dropped on the floor the slippery entrails of a sacrificial animal that were placed in his hands by a haruspex. (a soothsayer) Crassus attempted to correct this mistake by crying, "Fear not, despite my age, the hilt of my sword will not slip out of my hand". On the day of the battle, Crassus wore a black tunic, instead of the purple one de rigeur for Roman generals. Even though Crassus quickly returned to his tent to change, he left his officers speechless. We can still imagine those officers crossing their fingers ("fare le corna", forefinger and little finger raised, a very efficacious propitiatory gesture of Etruscan origin) and grasp a certain part of their body. Moreover, Crassus refused to listen to his veterans who were in favour of marching on the coast and avoid the desert to reach the Parthian capital. Rather, he trusted the arab Arimanes and his six thousand horsemen, who had secretly sided with the Parthians and abandoned the Romans few
There is also a similar story in the Chitral Valley in northern Pakistan, where many of the local Kalash people have blue eyes and blond hair and worship a pantheon of gods. They claim descent from Alexander the Great's Macedonian soldiers. The difference with the story about Romans in China is that Greeks did actually enter today's Afghanistan and Pakistan with his army. The Bactrian Empire in Afghanistan was one of the successor states to Alexander's own empire. There have been attempts to prove this theory through DNA testing as well.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
It seems unclear only because you're not thinking with a 50BC brain -- you're thinking with a 2007AD brain.
Your brain sees -- clearly -- a picture map of the world from space.
A 50BC brain sees no such thing.
To the well-educated 50BC brain, it would be self-evident that continuing to travel East will bring you to the edge of the world. Perhaps they planned to then circle around the "edge" and come back "up" the Nile -- something that's hinted at in the "Alexander" film that came out a couple of years back.
Or perhaps they figured they'd circle "around" to the North, and come down "through" Gaul to get home.
This is all assuming that such a "lost legion" did, in fact, exist -- something I personally feel is unlikely.
It wasn't in TFA, but did anyone else notice the resemblance between the name of the village, Liqian, and the latin word Legion (it was pronounced legio or legionis according to wikipedia)?
Does it mean anything in Chinese?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
but this is also the sort of story that we tend to never see a followup on.
i'm not trying to be negative, but perhaps a motivator of sorts.
What's the expiry date?
Not surprising.
The outer Mongolia is the region to which every single major Eurasian human migration can be traced. Before DNA techniques, language techniques and historical references have been used to trace these migrations.
Most of that has now been confirmed using DNA. There was a number of waves going as far back as the Dorian invasion which overthrew the bronze age greek civilisations and established what 500 years later became the golden age greece. This was followed by gotts, westgotts, barbarians, huns, bulgarians, etc. All of them displaced from outer mongolia a few centuries before they ended up in Europe.
The early waves were speaking indo-european languages and with distinct caucasian appearance. The last ones (huns and pra-bulgarians) were speaking languages from the Turk language group and were of mongoloid appearance.
So finding a blond or even a redhead in mongolia is not suprising. After all Chengis Khan was a redhead.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
...they left their Real ID papers back there in Rome.
We wouldn't have to do all this DNA checking if they kept their Imperial ID cards with them...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Mihi amo tu diuturnus, combibo quinque denario"
That "Liqian" is phonetically pronounced almost exactly like "legion," but with the accent on the first syllable.
Maybe Prester John was really in China? (Not unless he actually ended up in Utah or some other wacky idea...)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Meaning, the girl was a direct descendant of that woman who lived around 2,000 years ago.
I'm confused by the emphasis on the word direct here. How could you be an indirect descendent of someone? Either you can trace a lineage path back to them or not.
It's surprising that prominent genetic features like hair colour could survive so many generations of interbreeding with non blondes but I guess if that person was promiscuous enough, they started a broad enough tree that chance allowed the blonde gene to survive.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I remember an ambulance driver in France, near Chalons en Champagne, with distinctive asian features. Since he had a Russian name, I asked him once how his father looked like... but he smiled and told me his father looked Caucasian - OTOH his mother looked very much like himself. A fascinating explanation ensued: a Hun tribe had settled somewhere between Chalons and Troyes after the Battle of Catalaunic Fields in 451 instead of going back to Pannonia with the rest of Attila's army. They lived in a relatively isolated valley until recently, which kept their genes from being overly diluted. HLA groups are useful at detecting genotypes, and it seems theirs is clearly Asian.
Now this is nearly unelievable because I know this area: mostly plains, lots of roads. Such a story seems unlikely to the casual listener; however, I did ask an Haematologist about it. He confirmed this story which is well-known in the field.
I'm confused by the emphasis on the word direct here. How could you be an indirect descendent of someone?
Of course. Maybe I should have put the emphasis on 'was' instead.
As far as I remember, the scientists were just looking for clues about the origins and where stunned when they realized that the girl was actually related to a 2,000 year old mummy they found (more or less) by accident.
Just because you lose a commanding officer doesn't mean your escape route is suddenly cut off. Unless there was no second (or third or fourth) in command and the footsoldiers were little more than knuckle dragging morons who could barely tie their own shoelaces then they could have got out the same way they would if they had a commanding officer. And if they really were so inept they couldn't manage it what are the odds on them being successfull mercenaries that manage to walk 2000 miles to central china??
Just recently there have been stories in the UK papers about some DNA testing in the north east of England, in Yorkshire. They've found one place where a number of folk have DNA matching the same as one specific group in Sub-Saharan Africa, and this must have happened at least a few hundred years ago.
My theory is humans just like to travel around a bit, or sometimes settle far from home because of economic or political necessity or benefit. Hey, we see it today, why not 2000 years ago?
In the UK we've got Hadrian's Wall, big old wall the Romans built in the north of England. There's documented proof that soldiers from other parts of the Empire were stationed there, from north Africa, Greece, Spain, etc... Who's to say a few of them didn't taking a liking to the place and decide to settle, maybe met a local girl, got a bit of a good little business number going locally, that sort of thing?
The idea of a bunch of soldiers going freelance in exchange for a load of money and ending up quite a long way from home (Romans in China) - well why not?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think they mean direct descendant as in you can trace the lineage directly back to that person. An indirect descendant (not sure if that's the proper term) can have DNA traits tracked back to a particular group of people, but maybe not back to a specific person.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
When Crassus was ejected from the Roman empire, for a failed coup, he took his legion east. They knew (from merchants) that a great empire lived on the other side of the hated Parthians, so they marched in a loop northeast and eventually became border guards for the Chinese emperor. It makes sense, they already knew how to fight the Persians and couldn't live anywhere near the Roman sphere.
"Liqian" is supposedly "Roman" Sinosized.
This made the news in 2005, when the walls and tombs were found:
http://orbis-quintus.net/blog/?p=1700
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Tocharians are the easternmost "Scotch-Irish" clan ;-)
On a message board discussing the blonde and redhaired Chinese, somebody noted that there are a lot of them in Canada, but that their origin was not Tocharian or Scythian, it was L'Oreal!
The outer Mongolia is the region to which every single major Eurasian human migration can be traced. Before DNA techniques, language techniques and historical references have been used to trace these migrations.
Most of that has now been confirmed using DNA. There was a number of waves going as far back as the Dorian invasion which overthrew the bronze age greek civilisations and established what 500 years later became the golden age greece. This was followed by gotts, westgotts, barbarians, huns, bulgarians, etc. All of them displaced from outer mongolia a few centuries before they ended up in Europe.
Actually, no. There were lots of nomadic invasions that came from places other than the Mongolian plain. Most of the Germanic tribes that laid the Roman empire low came from Scandanavia. The Slavs that were the terror of the Balkans around 600 A.D. came from the Pripyet marshes.
Plenty of nomadic invasions hailed from the Mongolian plain, however. The Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Alans, the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols, to name a few.
C'mon, everyone knows spaghetti grows on trees.
I was disappointed by the wording implying a more direct connection when none had been established.
That there were "Caucasians" (using quotes even though Blumenbach may have been right) all over Asia is an established and quite interesting area of study.
If I've read the linguist and genetics mail list archives correctly, the Sinitic peoples are themselves "split" from the Caucasian, in other (probably less accurate) words, a bunch of Caucasians crossed the Tien Shan/Altay ranges, the genetic bottleneck caused thereby accounting for the distintive features of the Sinitic peoples.
Oh, what do I mean by "Blumenbach may have been right?" That a darker-complexioned folk with woolly hair got to the Caucasus, and "bleached out" as they adapted to living in valleys with less insolation than the flats (skin pigmentation in humans seeming to be driven by the need for vitamin D).
This theory neatly accounts for the black Georgians of Herodotus. According to the legends Herodotus records, they were remnants of an expedition of a Pharoah Sesostris, "most manifestly are Egyptians." In the "Caucasians from Caucasus" theory, this dark-complexioned, woolly-haired folk in Georgia is simply the relict population which didn't bleach out.
I am not providing many links, because those interested in the assertions of this post will be rewarded by doing their own research. Really. Get thee to a search engine and find out.
Many cultures have legends about a place in or around Central Asia around which the world rotates: Shambala, Olmo Lungring, Mount Meru. The more Central Asian history I learn, the more it seems like World History does rotate around an axis with one pole in Central Asia and the other in Mesopotamia.
IMPO, by far the most interesting theories regarding Central Asia are those of radio pioneer Reginald A. Fessenden. Of course something so old will have a lot of bad guesses, but what's amazing is what he got right - giant glacier lakes in Central Asia, the *outflow* of the Black Sea during the Ice Age, apples (and therefore the Hesperides) being from the east - and how he divined the information from the mythologies: Schleimannesque.
It wasn't in TFA, but did anyone else notice the resemblance between the name of the village, Liqian, and the latin word Legion (it was pronounced legio or legionis according to wikipedia)?
I'm sure somebody has, and right now they're engaging in silly speculation just like you. There's no lack of examples of pairs of words in widely separated or unrelated languages that have vaguely similar pronunciation and meaning (and the link in meaning you have in mind is very vague). Your reaction is just pareidolia and confirmation bias.
Compare to the way historical linguists compare languages: they don't just put words next to each other and say "gee, don't they look similar," but rather, they state rules that describe a systematic sound correspondence between the core vocabularies of the languages in question ("in every place where a core word of language A contains a 'k' sound between two vowels, its proposed cognate in language B contains a hard 'g' sound").
Also, 'Liquian' is a pinyin romanization of a modern Mandarin word, using a contemporary Beijing pronunciation of the words in questions. Now, I'm no sinologist, but I can tell you that you should not assume too quickly that the pronunciation of a word today reflects very closely the way it was pronounced 2,000 years ago.
Are you adequate?
"Parthians, an empire occupying what is now Iran." Iran existed way before 53BC. Parthians, Persians and Medyans were all iranian tribes of that era. Parthians took over the country after 200 years of Greek's army power (Alexander the great invasion). From wikipedia.org : "The name Iran is a cognate of Aryan and literally means "Land of the Aryans." They started to call Iran Persia, after 553BC when Cyrus the great became the emperor. On the other hand, Iran is a term that used to refer to that land before the Achaemenian empire and during the Medyan dynasty.
Thank you for posting this.
/., good thing your comment already is modded +5).
It wasn't out of ill intend that I twisted the story to sound as if the romans were "happy mercenaries", to me that was also what the news sites I read about this gave me a bit of the impression that this was what had happened.
I did not come upon this information in my (admittedly scarce) research for this posting, I am thankful for you bringing this up to me. I will at least correct my blog (no editing is allowed in
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
'Helped out' a village?
Just in case parent isn't modded up, or doesn't log in to repost, here's what he wrote for the benefit of those who skip ACs. AFAIK it's dead right and should be pointed out very clearly!
No, they didn't think the Earth was flat at Columbus' time. They even knew the approximate circumference of the Earth, which is why they (correctly) thought Columbus was a crackpot. He thought the Earth was a lot smaller, therefore it'd be a relatively short trip across the Atlantic to India. This was obviously wrong, but he got very lucky and there was something else there ("West Indies") so they didn't all die.
...knock down my city wall!
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Gu Meina, now six, was born with a shock of blonde hair. "We shaved it off a month after she was born, but it just grew back the same colour,"
well duuuhhh ?
I was surprised from the comments here that no one mentioned Crassus or his defeat at Carrhae as possibilities, then I read TFA and it's right in the article itself!
According to accounts of the battle, of a 30,000 strong force, 10,000 were killed, 10,000 survived and 10,000 were captured and either employed as slaves or mercenary labor:
From http://www.unrv.com/fall-republic/battle-of-carrha e.php:
In the end, the great bulk of the Roman army was hunted down and killed or captured. Nearly 20,000 were killed and another 10,000 captured. Of the original force, only about 5,000 men under Cassius, and the cavalry that departed early, managed to escape. The Parthians meanwhile, settled the Roman prisoners in an eastern territory called Sogdia. Interestingly, the Han Chinese later captured this area and the Roman transplants were likely among the first westerners to meet the Chinese directly.Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Same story another millenia...
So what if that european genes trasferred from east ?
Who is the Etrusk ?
Western history and education to much biased for western culture...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
WTF does British Petroleum have to do with a calendar?
I am not sure if the height the guy mentions in the article can be attributed to the Romans. The romans weren't that tall. During the invasion of Britain, the average Roman soldier was about 5'6 at about 5x BC. Assuming that these ppl went to China around the same time, I would see their height staying relative to the chinese ppl there based on the food they eat and life style they lead.
If you take into account that "Europeans" comprise many distinct groups, it's a bit hard to say that all "Europeans" came from one region in central Asia. I also wonder whether the distinction between Europe and Asia is really relevent when discussing genetic hisory. Perhaps Eurasia makes more sense.
That said, I have read a theory that Celts came from a region in what is now China and crossed Siberia and Russia into Europe. Interestingly enough, they then went and invaded Rome. This was all before Rome got organised, and started invading other people, so maybe this story shows a full circle. Then again, maybe the genes existed in China well before the Romans arrived.
It's also interesting to note that Australian Aborigines (I think all three racial groups) share the genetic trait of being the ability to have blue, green, or brown eyes and blonde, red, etc hair with caucasians. As far as I know, they are the only black skinned people who exhibited this before contact with Europeans. I'd be interested to know how this came about, whether the trait spread from Eurasia to Australia, or vice versa.
I don't therefore I'm not.
What is that supposed to mean? Did they lose a battle and flee to china rather than facing their superiors? Did they lose their sense of direction? (How can you mistake east for west?)
Look at a map. If they were captured by the Parthians and after a period of captivity in Parthia, if they escaped to the east or were released/expelled/sold to the east, the way back home to Rome in the west would have been blocked by the Indian Ocean to the south, Parthia itself (Iran) in the center, and the Caspian Sea and the Hun Empire to the north. I can easily imagine them deciding to follow Alexander the Great's legacy and move eastward.
Actually, that is just one theory about the Dorian invasion. In fact, there isn't that much solidly known about the identity, ethnic or otherwise, of the Dorians.
I grew up my whole life thinking that American Indians were descended from Hebrews who arrived in America in 600 BC. And by 'Native Americans' I mean Polynesians, Inuit, and everyone else native to North and South America and the Pacific Islands (as long as they weren't too black of course). Then I read a story on the Internet about DNA research compiled by Simon Southerton. Guess What? His research confirmed what common sense, linguistic, and archaeological evidence also suggested: that Native Americans came from Asia. As sad as it is, that was the most life-changing experience I've had so far.
Ah yes. . .the XI Expeditionary Legion was first led by Biggus Dickus, and after his death, by Naughtius Maximus.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
descendants of these war-mongering westerners were responsible for development and testing of the Chinese anti-satellite weapon.
:wq
As a comment on my blog also points out the pdf linked to above is not all that scientific, for example it does not cite it's sources.
I have not read this through yet but I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this subject should take a closer look at this pdf which sure does look much more worked through and authoritative on the subject.