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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."
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
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!
The problem of ascribing pasta to the Romans is that this particular food is not described in the texts at all. We know more about Roman dining customs than about any other ancient people, with whole recepies reconstructed, see Patrick Fass' Around the Roman Table (University of Chicago Press, 2005). And pasta is nowhere to be found.
There are genetic markers that separate the Asian and European populations quite well - much study of the difference between these populations has been part of the HapMap project.
I haven't read the article... but I don't think they will use the standard 13 markers used for e.g. paternity testing. More likely to use the chips that contain more than 500000 markers to get a good coverage of the genome. Assuming only one Roman was in an individual's ancestry, after ten generations 0.5^10*500000 = 488 markers would be from the Roman. Only one needs to distinguish Asian/European ancestry for some sort of proof. It would still be difficult to make an definitive statement about Romans but give the good circumstantial evidence I don't think the burden of proof will be too high.
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Is only passed down from mother to daughter. while a male child will get it from his mother his child will get it from theirs.
A roman legion is most likely all male. while possible a few women a were present it is doubtful. especially after being lost for 17 years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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 -----------------------------------
Now here's a theory!
Supposing that the Romans introduced spaghetti to the Chinese!
Hmmmm......
And then Marco Polo brought it back?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Replying to my own message I know... but going away and thinking about this some more, they will probably try looking at the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is passed down intact in the male line so will give a very strong European signal if a Roman ancestor was a direct male only ancestor. I'm guessing the mitochondrial line which is passed down in the female line would be no good as not many Roman solders were female...
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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.
In addition to the fact that European spaghetti dates to 300 BC, there's also controversy over whether Marco Polo ever went to China at all. Polo's famous book about his travels never mentioned any Chinese place names, the Chinese style of writing, chopsticks, or woodblock printing. The Chinese bureaucrats never recorded his presence, despite recording the presence of other Westerners who had been to China (Polo was not the first Westerner in China, but he was the first to write a book about it). Many modern scholars think that Polo perhaps ended up in the Middle East, and wrote the book about China based on third-hand knowledge he heard from Persians or Arabs there.
That'd be the lost greek legion.
If you see a rock violating the law of gravity, then the law is wrong, not the rock!
Read more here, including a picture.
Anybody familiar with history will know Europeans have long rambled across most of Asia. Even today there are fully European looking people in Afghanistan, and most Indians and all Persians and Pakistanis have some or even alot of European ancestry. Despite the name 'European' the 'Europeans' have always lived in parts of Asia.
Unlike their earlier Greek counterparts, Roman soldiers were forbidden from interfering with each other and were also forbidden from interfering with themslves (THAT was a death penalty offence). The chances of any Roman soldier passing up the opportunity of getting jiggy with the local ladies is teeny-tiny.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
Yeah, if a woman was along with all those lost men, she would have asked for directions!
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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.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
What's the expiry date?
Not sure how well Slashdot handles Chinese, but the characters are . ("Li" is the 'li' meaning 'beauty' on the right, with the horse radical on the left, and means 'black horse'. "Qian" is the 'gan' meaning 'dry' on the right, with the 'leather' radical on the left. The simplified form is this: .
Given that it's only really the English pronunciation of "legion" that resembles the Chinese word (which is pronounced like English 'li-chien' would be; Wade-Giles romanization is li-ch'ien with aspirated ch), the resemblance is probably a coincidence. Then again, I have no idea how western Chinese people would pronounce those characters, so it may indeed be a corruption of "legion". I hope it is; that would be fascinating!
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/
Actually, there are different theories, but one of them says, based on linguistic evidence, that it worked the other way around, that is, the Europeans came from the region that we nowadays know as Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. That would explain the close linguistic relation between most European languages and Persian and Hindi.
The term "camp follower" derives from the collection of merchants, the ancient equivalent of "contractors", family and prostitutes that followed legions.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...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 ]
Essentially meaning "Me love you long time, SUKI SUKI five dolla" but the Roman equivalent
Unlike their earlier Greek counterparts, Roman soldiers were forbidden from interfering with each other and were also forbidden from interfering with themslves
Ahhhh yes, "Directivus Primus".
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.
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?
"Riken"? That last one uses Japanese kanji, which are slightly different from Chinese writing (uses a mix of Simplified, traditional, and some character forms unique to Japanese). For that matter, all 3 links give the traditional/Japanese characters for the name.
This gives the Simplified characters for the name.
OSx86 FTW
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.
Thanks for that. After searching around a bit using the Chinese characters I could find quite an informative article for the Economist from just over two years ago describing the situation there.
On my web-search for "Roman looking" Chinese I found this commented slideshow (flash) showing a little girl with blond hair and a local farmer with green eyes.
Well, let's see what the DNA study will uncover.
Btw - Liqian and "legion" does sound similar, but keep in mind that the original Latin pronunciation does differ quite a bit from the contemporary English (and even Italian) pronunciation.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
(1 woman + legion of male soldiers)*(17 lonely years)=?
If a woman was along with all those lost men, she would probably be too exhausted to ask for directions.
The proto-Indo-European language/culture (or Indo-Iranian or Arya-European; there's not a clear distinction, especially among non-linguists) most likely started in Central Asia and worked its way both west into Europe and south into Northern India/Pakistan/Afghanistan. The split occurred before recorded history, and it's extremely difficult to tell exactly when and where it happened linguistically without other clues. I'm not sure if any languages in East Asia are from the Indo-European family, but I would imagine there was at least some small amount of cultural exchange. The Aryans migrated all over the place.
"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.
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It seems that the rest of Slashdot has a much more haploid oriented view of DNA collection than I do.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien