The Population of the Mediterranean Basin in the First Millennium AD Migration Period

Abstract

The peopling of the Mediterranean basin in the first millennium AD can be determined by exploring a combination of cultural, economic and biological factors that influence the structure of populations and determine particular situations of gene frequencies. Quantitative characters from 2,487 adult crania of both sexes from central and southern Europe and the Italian peninsula were analyzed using multivariate statistical analyses. Biological distances representing phenotypic variation between these populations were not found. An analysis of Mahalanobis D2 distances established a great homogeneity. This scarce morphological variability is shown also by principal component analysis. The application of cluster analysis shows the formation of two clusters: one distributed along the Adriatic coast; the other along the Tyrrhenian. This model is similar to the first millennium BC pattern. The difference is that in this case there are no significant biological divergences but only geographic ones, perhaps attributable to micro-adaptive factors. These two lines flow together in the populations of central and southern Italy. The phenomenon of the Migration of People (or Barbarian Invasions) in Italy during the first millennium AD does not seem to produce a significant variation in the Italian genetic substratum. This could be associated with the great gene flow that the Roman Empire opened, not only in the Mediterranean basin but also in Europe, following the conquest wars. Over time this produced a new general genetic model common to southern Europe and Italy that explains the low variability found in this study.