From Dawn to Dusk: The Rise and Spread of the Greek/Eastern Mediterranean Component in Italy

Iron Age central Italians were genetically similar to contemporaneous Central Europeans. During the Imperial period, however, the Italian gene pool underwent a clear shift with the rise of an Greek/Eastern Mediterranean (GEM) component, consistent with movements from the Empire’s eastern provinces toward Rome. In this regard, we recently suggested that this ancestry may have begun to spread earlier, in the Late Republic. To trace the origin and trajectory of the GEM ancestry, we will perform an archeogenomic analysis focusing on two key moments that marked its rise and decline in Italy: the period of Magna Graecia (MG, 8th-5th cent. BCE) and Late Antiquity (LA, 5th-8th cent. CE). MG represents a cosmopolitan phase of the Iron Age, shaped by intense Mediterranean mobility and extensive Greek colonization in Southern Italy, possibly contributing to the spread of the GEM ancestry in the Italian peninsula. By contrast, LA marks the end of Italy’s central political role, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and large-scale movements of Germanic peoples, which may have diluted the GEM component. Our study includes over 400 MG ancient samples and 60 LA ones, framed in a database of nearly 500 new individuals spanning four millenia, from the Copper Age to the Medieval time. This study will allow us to precisely reconstruct the GEM evolutionary history through time and to shed light on the complex demographic and political events at the base of the Italian genomic landscape.