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The souls of peoples gone



Stonehenge was first erected around 3100 BC, though the timber was only replaced with stone in 2600 BC. The great monument was a product of the Late Neolithic in Britain. Ancient DNA today tells us that these people were distantly related to the modern Sardinians, and derive from a wave of farmers that radiated out of Anatolia across much of Europe.

About a century after the stone form of Stonehenge was erected, prehistoric Britain was culturally and genetically transformed. In the space of a few centuries after 2500 BC there was nearly a ~90% genetic turnover, and a new people more closely related to Northern Europeans in Germany and further east became ascendant. The majority of the ancestry in Britain today probably derives from this migration period.

And yet the new people continued to utilize Stonehenge for over 1,000 years. Clearly, they co-opted a monument erected by their predecessors and maintained its significance across an enormous cultural disruption.

This is on my mind because on the episode of The Insight recorded with Patrick Wyman (it will probably drop in June) we talked extensively about Roman demography. And one of the peculiarities of 2013’s The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe is that Italy has a lot of deep population structure. From the paper:

There is relatively little common ancestry shared between the Italian peninsula and other locations, and what there is seems to derive mostly from longer ago than 2,500 ya. An exception is that Italy and the neighboring Balkan populations share small but significant numbers of common ancestors in the last 1,500 years, as seen in Figures S16 and S17. The rate of genetic common ancestry between pairs of Italian individuals seems to have been fairly constant for the past 2,500 years, which combined with significant structure within Italy suggests a constant exchange of migrants between coherent subpopulations.

The implication here is that there’s population structure deeper than the Roman period. When I first saw these results I was surprised. Looking at genome-wide data I was pretty sure that most of the modern Italian population dated to the Roman Republican period, but I was not expecting provincial level substructure. It was like telling me that the Samnites and Umbrians were still with us!

But what about the great cosmopolitan cities of Neopolis, Rome, and Ravenna? Some commenters on this blog routinely get frustrated when I dismiss the textual and epigraphic evidence of massive migration into the Italian peninsula during the height of the Roman Empire. Actually, I believe that this migration occurred. I just do not believe it was particularly impactful genetically today. Though my general outlook on this issue goes back over ten years (in part thanks to the suggestion of Greg Cochran), I believe the issue here is that cities are such incredible demographic sinks.

Roman urban cosmopolitanism was parasitic on migration. Demographically it was never self-sustaining. In fact, as Patrick points out urban areas probably did not see sustained above replacement reproduction anywhere in the world before about 1900, with the emergence of germ theory and massive public sanitation works, especially in the United States. This is evident in books as diverse as Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome and The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

So did Roman urban civilization leave nothing to posterity? On the contrary. Like much of Rodney Stark’s work in the last twenty years Cities of God is needlessly polemical and oftentimes unscholarly*, it gets at the reality that Christianity was fundamentally an urban cult. It was brought to Italy by people from the Eastern Mediterranean, Jews and Greeks. In its early period it was dominated by urban cosmopolitans. Some of the sermons in urban churches even castigated rural peasants  as pagan beasts of the field.

Christianity was an international religion with foreign origins, and like many elite cultural constructions of the pre-modern oikoumene its existed operationally as a social network across the various cities around which elites congregated. In some ways the vast sea of villages which filled in the landscape were untouched by many of the cultural innovations occurring in the cities. A Neolithic person might be confused by some aspects of Roman village life (in particular, access to standardized manufactured goods), but they would be totally flabbergasted by the city of Rome.

Over the 200 years between 400 AD and 600 AD the population of Rome probably went from ~500,000 to ~50,000. The decline of the Western Empire and the period of the Gothic Wars choked off the economic subsidies which could maintain the city’s population by drawing newcomers. And yet the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, remained in the city. If Patrick and I are correct then medieval Rome was repopulated by the descendants of peasants from Lazio, the hinterlands around the city.

Some scholars, albeit often from a partisan Protestant viewpoint, have suggested that the Western Christian Church of the early Middle Ages did not truly Christianize the peasantry. Whether this is true or not, it does seem to correct to say that deeply rooted popular Christianity took many centuries to become pervasive in rural areas. Despite their relative decline in the medieval period, both substantively and in terms of cultural prestige, cities remained remained the stalwart redoubts of Roman Christianity. They were the braintrust of European civilization, even if they were not demographically self-sustaining.

To a great extent the last ten years has seen a refutation of “pots not peoples.” It turns out that many of the archaeological transitions seen in the physical record correlate with demographic changes inferred from genetic changes. And yet we know from history that some peoples and social groups which were highly influential left far less of a demographic footprint. I suspect that the rise of cities and complex polities transformed the “pots not peoples” calculus significantly.

* Google the fact that about ten years ago Stark was dismissing reports that Americans were getting more secular as wishful thinking by biased liberal scholars. Who do you really think had a bias with hindsight?

16 thoughts on “The souls of peoples gone

  1. It was like telling me that the Samnites and Umbrians were still with us!

    When I studied ancient Roman military history years ago, I got annoyed at the Romans, because they seemed not to have annihilated the Samnites. Despite losing territory and influence to the Romans and even after being defeated decisively, Samnites seemed to have persisted and were always ready to aid a would-be foreign conqueror of Rome. It always puzzled me why the Romans did not go genocidal toward them and seemed to have left them alone to (eventually) sink into obscurity.

    I believe the issue here is that cities are such incredible demographic sinks.

    Roman urban cosmopolitanism was parasitic on migration. Demographically it was never self-sustaining.

    Some students used to question me all the time why the Romans and the Byzantines couldn’t simply recruit massive armies from their large cities and fend off the barbarians. That’s because they were under the impression that ancient cities were like modern cities, full of young people in their prime who could be mobilized efficiently with modern organizational and transportation infrastructure.

    They didn’t understand that city people in the past were often diseased and malnourished and lacked useful military skills, so they were not exactly great recruit material. Furthermore, because they existed in dense concentrations in difficult-to-navigate neighborhoods which they controlled, they weren’t exactly easy to herd into forced conscription (there would be riots and violence).

    In the pre-modern times, bulk of military recruits almost always came from the countryside and the border marches, the former because the areas that produced foodstuffs had healthier populations with higher fertility and the latter because border areas produced tough people inured to physical hardship and violence.

  2. “Despite their relative decline in the medieval period, both substantively and in terms of cultural prestige, cities remained remained the stalwart redoubts of Roman Christianity.”

    What about the monasteries. Certainly they played a key role in the preservation of texts. See:
    “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt
    https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World-Became-Modern/dp/0393343405/

    BTE: Razib please add your code to the link.

    Further, the monasteries acted as demographic sinks just as the cities had, to limit the Malthusian effect of population growth.

  3. Isn’t there at least one substantial remnant of both migrations into the imperial Rome and of is urban masses, the European Jews? The sex biased admixture in Southern Europe is well documented, with about half of the autosomal DNA and most of the Y having Near East origin, while the largest, and most ancient, of many layers of European autosomal admixture is Mediterranean ( Carmi 2017) and the most abundant mtDNA clades are also represented in nonJewish Italians ( Behar 2013), albeit the diversity of these clades is richer in the Jews, suggesting a population decline or stagnation disproportionately affecting ancestors of the Italians?

  4. Walter Sobchak: he meant on a population level, as in that most Christians lived in the cities while the pagans lived in the pagii.

  5. The history of Rome seems chock full of members of the elite who left few or no descendants and whose “line” died out.. I was wondering if the polygamy and unlimited sex slave availability (at least in legal terms, you could have as many as you wished) in Muslim empires means that their elites left more descendants? (of course a lot of the wives and all the sex slaves would be non-Arab or non-Turk, as the case may be)

  6. The history of Rome seems chock full of members of the elite who left few or no descendants and whose “line” died out..

    By the way, this also happened in pre-modern Japan. Some daimyo and high-ranking samurai (who survived wars and battles) seemed to have led remarkably long lives for pre-modern times, but seemed to have left few children.

  7. I was at Stonehenge a few days ago because we were sightseeing in England. They have already included the image of Cheddar Man in the material at the site.

    A couple of reactions. The stones are smaller than they appear to be in photographs. It is still an impressive accomplishment for neolithic technology. Although the Great Pyramid is both contemporaneous and much bigger.

    Second: The case for an astronomical purpose for Stonehenge is very weak.

    First, the Stonehenge you see today may, or may not, be the Stonehenge that was built 4500 years ago. There is a record of what Stonehenge looked like in the early 19th century in the form of paintings by two of England’s most outstanding painters: John Constable (1835) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1827). It looks to me like the site has been tided-up and stones have been re-erected or moved. That severely limits any implication of astronomical purpose in the original object.

    Second, It is easy to orient a structure on a north-south axis because of the pole star. And therefore east and west are fixed, and are the locations of the equinoxes. The solstices could be marked by driving a stake in the ground at sunrise. But, unless this were kept up for a long period of time. the sunrise points of the solstices would not be accurately established. Remember, the climate there tends to the cloudy and rainy.

    Further, unlike the Egyptians, the Mesopotamian Civilizations, and the Maya, there is no evidence of writing or record keeping at Stonehenge. Astronomy is very difficult without writing and record keeping.

    Third. Stonehenge like any other high point on a fairly open plain has defensive advantages. It might have been erected as a cultic site and later used as a defensive stronghold.

  8. Twinkie: In any elite there is a strong incentive- to limit reproduction because large numbers of children cut up the inheritance. Also, you see lots of cousin marriages, with the attendant genetic risks, for the same reasons. They may be keeping property or power in the family, but they are keeping recessive genes in the family as well.

  9. In any elite there is a strong incentive- to limit reproduction because large numbers of children cut up the inheritance.

    1. Not universally true, historically.

    2. Primogeniture takes care of estate preservation.

  10. 2. Primogeniture takes care of estate preservation.

    Read Shakespeare’s history plays. They are all about cousins fighting over an inheritance. Primogeniture protects neither Richard II nor Henry VI. Richard III solves primogeniture by killing his nephews.

    The Ottomans, whose Sultans, had harems, and any of the late Sultan’s sons could be the next Sultan. The winner solved his problem by strangling all of his brothers, full and half, with a silken bow string. They stopped doing that in the 17th Century and simply locked brothers up in the Cage.

  11. Hopefully the coming paper on Imperial Rome will answer some questions. It’s by Flavio de Angelis and called “Rome wasn’t built in a day: biomolecular analysis of ancient Romans” in case you were wondering.

  12. Read Shakespeare’s history plays.

    That happens regardless of fertility. I didn’t bring up primogeniture to suggest it solves all problems and brings forth peace upon earth… merely that it institutionalized (whole) estate preservation, which you claimed was an incentive for low elite fertility. Once primogeniture is institutionalized culturally, not just legally the whole estate is preserved – whoever wins the succession, by right or contest of arms.

  13. Hopefully the upcoming paper on Imperial Rome will have enough info to answer some questions:

    i was at the meeting. i don’t think i recall anything revolutionary in that paper. not sure i sat in on that but i can ask around.

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