Rethinking Barbarian Invasions through Genomic History | Patrick Geary

good afternoon I'm Robert I have the director of the Institute and Leon levy professor and it's a great pleasure to welcome you to the Institute today for a lecture a public lecture by Professor Patrick Geary and as always at the end of the lecture will be a question and answer period and then followed by a reception in the common room of food hall to which you are all kindly invited susceptor day's speaker is Professor Patrick Geary professor in the school of historical studies since 2012 and in fact I remember very well he started his tenure here I think must be generally the second 2012 which was also the first day actually in my new capacity kind of walked around and so the first person I saw was Patrick so which of course led to a serious case of imprinting on my case so Patrick is a leading historian in the Middle Ages whose research has opened new ways to understand interpret and define medieval past his work extends out of a vast range of topics immediately history both para logically and conceptually from reality to language ethnicity social structure and political organization and as you know a common feature I think all the schools here at Institute but particularly through historical studies it's very interesting to see kind of the the background and nationalities of the professors and the topics they study so we have a Danish scholar studying the Islamic culture an Italian studying Mongolia an Englishman studying the Netherlands so I was very happy to report that we have an American studying European medieval history Patrick earned his PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University and prior to coming to our Institute he was a distinct distinguished professor of history at University of California Los Angeles and a former director of both the UCLA Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies and the UCLA humanities consortium in addition to faculty appointments at Princeton University and University of Florida patrick has served as professor of history a Robert M Conway director of medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame sassette the scholarship has made significant contributions to a number of areas of medieval social and cultural history many of these sales and books have become standard literature in the field with translations into multiple languages all of these professor Geary himself controls including Dutch actually Petric outstanding work in the field has led to many major fellowships and honours I just mentioned a few a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute a Guggenheim Fellow a fellow at the Hungarian Institute for Advanced Study and recently the analyst Maya research award from the Humboldt Foundation he also directs the single plan project which provides online tool for the study of Carolinian monasticism currently and I think we who are much more about it this afternoon Patrick is leading a major project that studies the migration of European societies north and south of the Alps through the analysis of ancient DNA in longer board cemeteries in Central Europe in Italy and it's a terrific example I think how these days the humanities are branching out across the academic world including also into the Natural Sciences in his lecture today he will look at this conceptual technical and computational challenges many different ways of doing research using genetic data to help answer fundamental questions about the dynamics of populations in a crucial period of European history to actually have an important impact also in terms of national identity and so in many ways I think this is research that cutting edge and kind of taking risks also in terms of just the cultural and political ramifications so nice to say we're very happy and proud that Patrick joined our faculty and it gives me great pleasure to welcome him and hope you join me in welcoming him here to the stage thank you thank you very much Robert I if I was the first person you saw you were probably the first person that I saw and though I think I may have seen Charlotte shortly before I saw you so you and your family are deeply imprinted on on my memory of my first hours here at the Institute rethinking barbarian invasions let's begin with the classic image when as a flood the collection of powerful mountain streams long restrained a high valley are now and then guided by weak dams finally breaks free and inundates the lower plane wave follows upon wave current upon current until all become one bright see that slowly subsiding leaves everywhere traces of devastation but also flowering meadows which it had renewed with fertility such was the effect the famous migration of the Nordic peoples into the provinces of the Roman Empire this is the classic statement of the full kovanda home the wandering of the people's by johann gottfried Halla the great german philosopher poet of storm and ron this image of devastation yes but actually ultimately fertility new blood for a tired Europe a tired Roman Empire and this image of barbarian migrations that renew our strong current within a Romantic tradition from the early 19th century forward images of the Hungarian migration note the Warriors okay there may be a little fighting and little trouble but especially actually down here of course we have the peasant with his oxen coming to make fertile the Pannonian Plains or the Germanic invasions they're always oxen apparently he's got his sword he's got his shield but he's looking back to his wife in the ox cart with the author and this is this is romantic that goes to the present children's books always an artist I'm white I'd may be meaningful and this happy a nuclear family on their way to the Roman Empire to renew it so we have this image of the Barbarian a very nice-looking barbarians they look a lot like mathematicians to me but coming down into Europe to renew the tired world but of course there is another image of this it is not the Fulco von Dulong but the barbarian invasions the image somehow more typical for France and Italy for some strange reason that sees this as ultimately destructive raw brutality not at all disguised sexuality power that is only power to destroy and not to to create the sack of Rome by Alaric destruction exactly why they're dressed this way is is not clear to me I don't see any oxen in the picture well you know we can joke about this you know we wanted literature music art we were starved for these things looking for some plum sorry if we broke some stuff well we can joke about this but the other image of the barbarian invasions is pretty powerful in a recent book by a British historian we'll return to in a minute kind of says it all the fall of Rome and the end of civilization well that's all very nice but these days we're not even sure that these things happened we're not sure what went on in this bear were their barbarian migrations and this is not just an academic question is it this is not just a question that dusty people like myself are asking about the 4th 5th 6th century who might have said this Rome did not fall overnight it fell gradually they scarcely noticed what was happening until it was too late Germanic barbarians attracted by prosperity crossing looking for new life this is seen as even something positive in the Empire but then on December the 31st of the year 406 the Rhine froze and tens of thousands of Germanic barbarians cross the river full of the Empire and one on a rampage destroying the city and 410 Rome was sacked if Europe Falls it will fall because like ancient Rome it no longer believes in the superiority of its own civilization it will fall because it foolishly believes that all cultures are equal and that consequently there is no reason why we should fight for our culture in order to preserve it Garrett will ders address in Rome and honor of Robert of course in our Dutch colleagues two years ago this is not an academic topic barbarian invasions barbarian migrations renewal of the Empire is this a lesson of history that we need to learn today well as a historian I would say of course not the lessons of history are not like this what goes on in the 4th and 5th centuries are not telling us what is going on today and geert wilders in his determination to block islamic migration into europe to ban the Quran in Europe as a subversive book is not going to be the best interpreter of the barbarian migrations but we have to remember when we work on these questions that this is exactly where is going or it's going in the direction of political correctness as though that never happened and maybe it didn't happen in fact scholars right now not people like professor welders aren't really sure if the barbarian migrations ever took place this actually was not an old idea it starts really the first time people talk about migrations of peoples is really in the 16th 17th century and then they weren't even talking about this and today serious scholars are not quite clear what goes on brian ward-perkins our friend that we saw with the fall of rome then the civilization is no question yes a primitive barbarians came into the Empire and they messed it up well Peter Heather at London in that direction but he talked about incursions rather than barbarian invasions he's a little bit more reticent about his language macabre Goethe in Berlin who has recently been studying medieval migrations within the general context of migration history says we'll really these groups coming into the Empire had no effect what mattered was diffusion of some groups like Slavs into Europe but these Visigoths lumbergh's vandals and so forth we really there were no migrations guy Havel at York says no they weren't he migrations they were civil wars and there were armies that used barbarian troops in their civil wars but the migrations never took place this is a figment of Herod ax and others imaginations that has somehow run amuck in society well we can understand why contemporary European politicians want to play with this motif of howling barbarians coming from the north or coming from the south it's less clear why supposedly serious historians like myself are not really sure whether this took place and if it did was there a major demographic impact or was it a smaller impact were these peoples in the sense of men women children animals oxen slaves coming in in massive numbers than having a demographic effect or were these small military units made up of men who entered the empire in the service of Rome or on raiding expeditions and we're very quickly absorbed into the local populations why don't we know we're historians isn't that our job well some would say it's ideological someday that politically correct historians want to talk about the transformation of the Roman world rather than the fall of Rome while the xenophobes want to talk about howling barbarians but that's all very good but there's also basic problem of evidence for example I'm going to be talking about a lot about the lungo Barty the lumbergh's so I'm going to use some lungo bard examples from the beginning and here is the closest to a contemporary eyewitness account of the lungo bard invasion of Italy as it's generally understood in 568 King Alba one of the lumbers supposedly invade Italy this is a text of Marius above Ross he is an exact contemporary of this he's writing probably about 580 but he's alive at this time he's probably drawing directly on materials written in Italy we have his text in exactly one manuscript and this is the entire text this is the everything that this eyewitness account the closest to the event this is our best evidence about Al Bowen and his invasion of Italy and I don't know what it says okay in this year Alban King the lovebirds with his army leaving and burning Pannonia they burned down their homes he says presumably so they couldn't go back or that others couldn't get them or whatever with their women so it's the entire people men women and children and those oxen both brown and white occupy Italy in Farah we'll come back to it and there some perish by disease some by famine and a few by the sword in that same year they presume to enter the frontiers of Gaul where a multitude of the captives of this people were for sale who perished and who got sold I don't know if you a lemur to a leaf army are non newly Gladio and aramta son maybe some of the lumber sounds like they lost sounds like they invaded and some of them were died of famine some of starvation some of them cut down and shortly after you could buy lumbers on the market or maybe it means that they invaded and there some people meaning the local Italians were killed and maybe they were selling slaves meaning Italians in Gaul you could read it either way so either as a great successful invasion or as a disaster well we have written texts like this very useful for clarifying things for us and then we also have archaeological texts the material culture of this world of this this lost world archeologists been digging around for a century and a half looking at the evidence of the longer barred migration well we begin because Roman texts tell us that there's a people called the longer Barty living in the Lower Elba in the first century they then vanish for three centuries and quite sure where they are if they still exist but then we start getting certain kinds of material in here in what is today the Czech Republic the Moravian region southern Czech Republic then it comes across the Danube the region of between Vienna and Budapest Ascension we start seeing kinds of stuff from sites this stuff hard to know I people say that there great similarities but I don't have enough imagination to see it but here you okay these s form fibula and then later on we find these things showing up in Italy well is that evidence that the people who really like these s form fibula started out here they moved down here then they came across here or that these kinds of things were popular and they move back and forth as you can have cultural transmission not object not people you don't necessarily mean that they up because you have these same objects that the people move with them but it may be cultural transfer may be the marketers were active here selling stuff up here selling stuff down here the chronology gets a little complicated because there different forms of these is supposed to be a particular type up here that should then later on you have a form here later on here unfortunately in between in Slovenia we find some of this form that are supposed to be earlier than they get here rather than here so it's a little bit problematic I often use the example you know you find this stuff this typical stuff that means that people moved it sort of like saying that if you look in American garages in a thousand years we will see a massive migration of Japanese into Princeton based on what we find in our garages okay well what's happening here is what some people refer to as a circular argument the ethnic paradigm okay we have text and we read them literally if we could understand what they're saying and there's some other text more Partin texts about the lumbers but it's written 200 years later based on lost sources maybe so we read the text literally so they were here the roba say they here here here ok then we draw from these written sources of map they must have gone like that because that's pretty much what what the texts say so we're going to dig around and we find oh well they must have inhabited this must have been their territories and they must have been up here and they moved like this so we begin to fit an ethnic map of these people and then with our shovels whatever we find there's there are that must be lungo barn that must be what distinguishes the lungo barns rather than that something longer bars like but a lot of people did as well and maybe they weren't longer Bart's anyway and then when we dig around and we find a corpse that is a lungo part at how do we know that that's all a lungo bard because he had these things and those things we know are typically long go bard and they had to be because they came from the territory of the lumber so you see where we're going with this a same sort of problem comes up in other situations if we take a look at typical barbarian period jewelry to identify national or ethnic groups as though what distinguished people was there their jewelry like saying well well progressives and Tea Party people you can tell them from their burial custom I have my doubts we should look but no nevermind so okay here's a kind of beautiful sword that's typically to identify with Franks the Franks are up here whoops well we got it over here where the lumbers were from may have been Central Europe and whoa all the way over here well that's not gonna help us very much with lumbergh's or with Frank's or anybody else so take a look at another specialty kind of sword oh that's really helpful now they're in England I thought those were Anglo Saxons they're up here where this was be franks they're also where they're supposed to be Saxons they're over here where they're supposed to be I don't know what maybe longer birds in jeopardy and then their daily as well and so forth with certain kinds of belt buckles they go all the way across the region certain kinds of special belt buckles they're all over the place even Roman stuff that ought to stay home like Byzantine farm helmets you know these maybe these are simply but Roman soldiers and this is the stuff that they use so we run into this problem that our material culture isn't terribly helpful I written culture is it very helpful so we desperately need some other kind of source to help us understand what is going on in this period and so many people want to turn to genetic investigation to a genomic investigation because what will this do this will tell us who you really are and this is just as dangerous as the kinds of things I've been suggesting before but right now we know that we are in a genomic revolution for $99 you can find out who you really are how many of you have had your genetic tests come on be honest yes you know who you really are cut through all of that culture and double talk by historians and you know who you really are because you spit into a bottle and shipped it off so a breakthrough for you discover your ethnicity your ethnicity in your genes maybe who do you think you are who are so the ideas will genetics is going to tell us who these people are now we'll know who the real lumbergh's are hungarian politician suggested upon the victory of the current fides party that that now thanks to genetics we will know who the real majors are but the reality is that genetics requires as much theoretical interpretive work as any other kind of research and the idea that genotype equals death group a cultural construct a sense of identity is completely misleading and potentially very dangerous this danger of essentializing essentializing to it a biological way to divide people to eliminate the complexity of the past into some kind of sharp objective identity a racial essentializing is not what serious geneticists mean though some people will turn a buck on things like this and it certainly is not going to be helpful to history let's remember everything we used to know about DNA in 30 seconds and my apologies to the people here who actually do this stuff you know we have two kinds we have uniparental we have that mitochondrial DNA mother mother mother all the way back to Eve the Y chromosome inherited directly from the father these do not recombine well Y chromosome does a little bit but let's pretend that it basically does not that that's what most people study that's why you you go back back your mitochondria goes back to Africa to wherever and you find out who you are or your father's life and a lot of studies historical studies have focused on these uniparental markers tracing them back it's like picking up a 500 page book reading one page in writing a review now I know lots of scholars do that but even those of us who do it know it's not the right way to do it then there's the autosomal the nuclear DNA all the rest of the DNA that is inherited from all of our ancestors and we get the whole crowd in the room not just mom mom mom dad dad dad but everybody back there all of these mixings and it's subject to recombination so at every generation it may change it doesn't all change it every generation but the possibilities are are enormous okay so what are we doing when we say okay we're going to use your net it's for history well we have to sequence the DNA that means that we have to get DNA from living or dead specimens the living a faster move there but it's easier to get it from them it's in better condition the dead they're just there but as soon as an organism dies the DNA begins to break down and it gets contaminated particularly by bacteria by anything that has ever touched it by any archaeologists or whatever so there all kinds of technical problems you've got to get your DNA then you have to decide what genes are going to study that to be amplified so that their signal stands out over the three point three thousand two hundred mega base genome you know over three you know is it billions of bits of data what are we going to look for here well we've got a resequenced the genome so that the sickle is single nucleotide polymorphism snips we'll be talking about these repeating sequences of microsatellites these that these these these units can be identified because those are the units we could try to work with for the most part a you know 10 million snips we're not going to do them all so we have to make some decisions so these then are example and compared to models that predict divergence going out or convergence back to a common ancestor but these are models and there are lots of ways the models could be constructed with the same data the same genetic diversity they're different ways of building different models so you have to if you're building models it's a very complicated thing and then you have to analyze what does it mean otherwise you're just looking at data and making up stories which some people do who does this well there have been some very interesting studies of attempts to study the migration period using genetic data some of the earliest and most interesting have concentrated on the anglo-saxons it's an island is somewhat isolated and they've been a number of studies Michael wheel is led several of these looking at y-chromosomal evidence of anglo-saxon mass my did a lot of Saxons come there a few Saxons come did they just send postcards and say please learn English to the Britons and they conclude the very complicated study looking at different regions east anglia but then comparing them with Frisia Norway and then also with Wales to see what is what is the Pat what is the where the y-chromosome seem Oh some of this is all modern DNA this is taken from living people and they conclude there's a massive y-chromosomal replacement and their various arguments about how that happened either they killed all the Britons are more likely that they had a marital advantage or reproductive advantage for centuries and gradually the Saxon y-chromosomes pushed out the rest in eastern England so that they're more similar to the continent than they are to Wales unfortunately other studies using different data sets say oh no there's actually no difference at all so it's a bit of a problem and much of the problem relies on the difficulty of using modern DNA that I'll come back to on the continent there not been as many studies but there's a very recent very interesting study by two people at USC having been at UCLA I naturally dis distrust them but they're doing now they're looking at nuclear DNA taken from modern samples and they're trying to find patterns of of identity by descent blocks within the DNA and trying to date them but trying to look at different levels 500 years a thousand fifteen two thousand years ago and see whether their patterns that might emerge and then how one might explain those patterns and their explanations is the Huns did it oh well both of these studies are interesting in that they are trying to answer questions about migration using modern DNA I have a lot of trouble with that the assumption in both cases is that the modern DNA you're collecting goes right back to the same ancestors you're trying to study so there's been massive immobilization back to this migration period there have been no major population movements which historians would say it's not clear Europe is always in motion there have been no major demographic constrictions creating bottlenecks in a loss of DNA such as the Black Death which I think still did happen killing between 1/3 and 2/3 of Europe's population so what survives in Europe's gene pool is not what was there in the 6th century or even the 13th century it's also assuming that these people actually go back that direction that that deep which is not at all clear the two grandparents or four grandparents from a village someplace who assumes that their family have been there forever that's denying history now it may be true but it's a leap of faith to say for 1500 years these people have simply been there we know that there is motion there is movement within peasant societies across the modern period across the medieval period and before the Middle Ages there's been a lot of movements so that this modern DNA is problematic is problematic in a study like this for another reason this European data set that a lot of people use is wonderful because there's very rich data it's collected for medical reasons and so it's available one of my problems as you see is getting ancient DNA is very expensive this is available but as all of this is from people who happen to wander through one Hospital in Lucerne Switzerland is there I'm from Italy I'm from Sweden I'm from Estonia and so forth and gave a sample and these points that locate them allocated post 1945 European map so Italian DNA could be Sicily or it could be a Sudhir ol French DNA could be Brittany it could be alphas which might have been join me in another time it could be Lille it could be Provos it's just French German post-1945 could be raw stock it could be possible it could be Munich it could be life tickets just German so it's there are a lot of problems with the data that they start with the science may be beautiful but it may be garbage in garbage out in terms of meaningful results there are also problems here about after they have these patterns how do they interpret them in fact they cite three history textbooks as their historical basis for saying this is to be explained by the Huns not a lot of deep collaboration with anyone so modern DNA I don't like it I mean I'm glad I have it but I would not want to trust it for my history work so we go to ancient DNA actually go to the people who tried to study forget about trying to get this modern stuff and say well their ancestors probably were the people listing up the ancestors this is a real problem too this is one of the more famous studies or I would say infamous some people think it's great a study not of Western migration but of Central Asia the Xiong nu the people who are not the ancestors the Huns but some people think they are people that nico linda cosmo loves and and works with and this archaeological team digging up this body which they think is from a Xiong nu period but they're even questions there they say we showed for the first time that an indo-european was present in the Shang no Empire and they go on to say this West Eurasian male in the Xiong nu Empire might show racial tolerance of the Xiong nu this is wonderful that genetic research shows a kinder gentler multicultural Empire of the Xiong nu what did they base this on well their friend has a particular bug for haplogroup r1a one and if we look at it on a map well yeah it's more common in Europe and South Asia it's a probability thing it's more common but oh dear it does exist in Asia as well it's possible that some distant distant ancestors of this individual may have come from Europe or maybe not but that he was an indo-european which is a linguistic category that he spoke an indo-european language is absolutely terrifying so far as I know the gene for indo-european languages has not yet been isolated now I made there I know that that some of my geneticist colleagues may be here and if you've found the gene for English please let me know there are a lot of people who could use it of the gene for American is probably a subcategory so this is this is a problem so what should we do with ancient DNA let me start with what we should not do I give you and this is for professor Helmut rhyme it's from the University this is the great sample of Frankish identity children who is the king of the salient franks dies in 480 his tomb is found in the 17th century here's his ring the picture I wanted to draw a line to show where the tooth fit but you can use your imagination and we have his wisdom tooth how we have it is a long story and I don't want to get into that but we've got the guy's wisdom tooth what it's in the cabinet the meta the collection of precious objects in the bibliothèque nationale in Paris if the French government momentarily had a brain freeze and allowed us to drill into it and if we could actually get some DNA out of it and if we could actually sequence it and completely sequence his entire genome what will we know about Frankish identity absolutely nothing it would not tell us whether this children who by the way was the father of King Clovis the first king of what would eventually be the Merovingian Kingdom eventually the Carolingian kingdom eventually France and Germany so this is the father of the first king of the French would say France would this tell us who the Franks are this foundational figure well not really he wouldn't tell us whether he thought he was a Roman or whether he thought that he was a Frank or what that might have meant to him it doesn't wouldn't tell us where he's from it wouldn't tell us where his people had migrated from if they had migrated from anywhere taken in isolation it would tell us very very little it would only give us one person's genome just floating out there in space and would tell us nothing about identity the Franks have alleged that they were trojans they left troy when the romans hero Aeneas left well so that the the Franks and they and it would well maybe he's got some Turkish DNA but this would be meaningless but there are a lot of these studies to go for the high profile person you know about the Richard the third found in a parking lot in Leicester a wonderful discovery what did we now know now we know that Richard the third is dead I was worried about that we also know that he did not ascend into heaven and given his life no one is really surprised at that so that he has a body beyond that does it mean that he killed the two princes and not that it's these are great fun and maybe they can use it to raise money and they're very very good geneticists in Leicester her working on this and they're working that angle I hope they get the money because I'm looking for it too but these discoveries are not really going to tell us very much that as an historian I want to know and will we find out that he has descendants today well of course he has descendants today high elite men in that period could have lots of gene flow as they call sex in the genetic biz and chances are that that everybody in this room is a descendant of this tooth but what does that really tell us so what should we do how could we do it better well I've got a project going tracing lung bird migration although it's really not long ago barred migration that's a shorthand I have no itches of logo bars I don't know if they ever existed but through DNA thus far I've gotten funding from the an ELISA Maya grant that rubber digraph mentioned from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which has gotten started and we're spluttering along with the generosity of the Germans so I've put together an international team an international and truly interdisciplinary team we've got archaeologists in Hungary in Germany in the Czech Republic in Italy who are working with us to get the bones and also the analysis of the cemetery because we're not accentuating bones and teeth we're interested in people in the entire cemetery we have a team of geneticists the primary primary work is going on actually in the laboratory David Carr merrily in Carmel in Florence but also with assistance of widow Barbra Jean Ian Ferrara was one of the major figures in working with ancient DNA and their students but also a geneticists in the US and so forth we have physical anthropologists because we're interested isotopic profiles of these material because we need models so we need to look at what isotopic analysis might give us in terms of ideas and then just a mess things up there some historians like me involved in so we're really trying to work together and what are we doing well we have acquired the remains of 600 people soon to be 800 when we get our bodies from the Czech Republic and we are in the process of extracting amplifying and sequencing doing basic mitochondrial DNA sequencing traditional sequencing from these 800 figures now thus far we've done just as a quick test the mitochondria of one section of mitochondria from a series of people from the Piedmont region of Italy we've run some some very very basic text this is sort of a network analysis this is a very very basic quick analysis of the mitochondrial connections if you don't see any pattern here you got it that's exactly right there's not much that we're going to learn from the mitochondria and for reasons that become obvious I doubt that that would tell us very much about migration anyway so what we need to do is to get the nuclear dean and we need to get into the depths of the DNA which is enormous ly expensive and for which I frankly don't have the money certainly not for 800 samples at about $1,000 a run so we're starting with two villages one in Italy near Turin and one on the Lake Balaton and these are sites that have been very carefully excavated we're getting isotopic analysis we can look at them kind of triangulate from various directions there are some similarities there are these kinds of row burials that seem to be typical of this period this is 6th century barbarian type burial some of these they try to date roughly comparable and you find stuff in up there some more these kinds of pens women where fibulas are called you see here and here there's some kind of connection but style whatever we don't know how they might run together what we want to do then is to do a very detailed analysis of the genetic material we can get out of it 10 years ago this would have been completely impossible today it may be possible using what is called next-generation sequencing we're looking for 5 mega byte will need point 2 percent of the whole genome if we did the whole genome I would have to sell my house to do one sample but we're going to focus on 2 percent of the genome looking at what are called with 5000 these snips that are known generally in population but graphics to identify regions where this sort of thing that you you test when you send this stuff off to a lab this might help us look at recent movement maybe it also is useful for looking at kinship because we'd like to know what is the organizer these who's buried next to home are these relatives is this a kindred group or not then we're going to take a look at five thousand one thousand byte regions of contiguous sequence that we can apply population demographics to to contest competing models that would give us an idea of how this population came to be in a more sophisticated way then we're going to look at some areas that might have something to do with medicine disease it's a period of plague because we're hoping to lure some medical money into this but what do we want to know to what extent of these longer Bartek and non longer bodies seminary structure how are they organized kinship gender social status where all kinds of arguments among historians well let's just see who's there what is the relationship between individuals buried in these cemeteries and we're also looking at symptoms that formally don't seem to be the same so they say they're not longer barble maybe none of our longer barred but the different cultural traditions as cultural tradition map with genetic or is there any reason that there are are they similar was there gene flow between these groups and if so is there is it sex bias there are some indications that that when migrant men move around they collect women from wherever they're going this image of the husband wife and the ox moving through Europe may not be right maybe the men moved they picked up women along the way one way or another and so we may find that these are very different groups and then is there genetic continuity between Pannonia that's the Hungarian Czech Austrian region and the Italian sites not saying that the lumbered but they is there a population movement in Europe in this period up what do we do with this well once we get this we have to analyze our data and the various ways to do that the first are called unsupervised that means when you let your lap 'sister then they lock the door and they just run amok I guess but it also means we're not testing alternative hypotheses about there they're just sort of eyeballing it trying to make interpretations maybe some statistics you're looking at individuals you're looking at genetic distance of individuals you're trying to see can you map out something about these people it's a good way to begin this example that I showed earlier is that there's no model implied here really it's just trying to see how these things relate but this is fine and with these you know mitochondria Y chromosome it can be useful looking at an ancestry ever fairly narrow sort but it is really not terribly helpful for bigger questions out demographic history for that we've got to look at models is model building and that's why this exact science is really just looking at models just like historians we build models what my text meant well we're building models of what perhaps this meant here we're testing hypotheses against each other we're not just looking at that of finding patterns and telling stories which sadly is what often is done at the end of very elegant scientific analyses they open a textbook to tell a story about it the Hun's did it these must be sexist but rather we're trying to build models and we're testing them populations and unit of analysis but what a population isn't that clear and you can create theoretical you could have a data sets that are hypothetical data sets imaginary sets then you can test them well against real data to see if these kinds of hypothetical models correspond at all to the actual data that we're getting and then we can actually get probability probability values rather than saying it's kind of like this you could say it is more probable that this story fits our data better than this other story which sounds pretty weak but it's better than what we've done before and then we can estimate parameters and unfortunately we can't test all possible models which would be infinite particularly we get into autosomal DNA but we have to use prior knowledge to figure these things out now that means communication with the archaeologists of Physical Anthropology historians to limit the possibilities of these models what was the original population size we don't know we have to guess what is the new population size we don't know who was up there before how many were down there later we have to build lots of models this is a very very simple example that one of the people in the team Sylvia Durazo in Ferrara has done with the mitochondrial material very very simple thing two models ah the people we've dug up are the direct ancestors of the people living in the region today oh there is no connection between the people we're living living - pretty crude kind of modeling but something so what do you do so you run 50000 simulations for each model with different data sets with Turin a great big city where many of the people have come in and you have two models you have the red model remember red model is model one either direct descendants the blue model number two there's no connection well there's no connection here probably no connection in this little village and there may be some connection here dubious here it's not entirely but so 50,000 tests and the best we can come up with is some maybes mitochondrial DNA for this purposes is not going to be terribly successful but this is the kind of modeling that we're supposed to do so what do we do with this data well we construct these models we compare our models with those proposed by the cultural anthropologist know we know that these people move because we have these burial rites these objects and so forth well let's take a look at how that would fit physical anthropologists isotopic analysis indicates whether people indigenous or exotic to a region compare our models with those proposed by textual historians what did marius actually mean who was winning against home and who got sold and then we try to create a model that is the model of models this is truly collaborative work this is not plugging things in but this is what we're trying to do now with all of this effort what are we going to get from this that we wouldn't get if we just sat down and learned our Latin better in red marius a little more carefully well let me tell you what we will not learn who these people really were that's not something we're going to find out who are you only you can say that and your genetics are not going to answer that question did the lumbergh's migrate from northern Italy to northern Europe to Italy did they even migrate from Pannonia we may find out if some people move of course they may have moved in the other direction as well there may have been a bi-directional movement over centuries but we won't know that there long go birds because thus far we have not found their personal passports or IDs saying I am a lunker bird or I'm not along a part I'm just part of the cemetery we will not find out which are the real longer birds and which are something else based on their genetics we will not find out which Italians today are descended from the longer bards the Northern League might like to know but we won't be able to help them we will not find out if the barbarian migrations destroyed the Roman Empire can't tell from genetics should Europe revise its modern immigration policies if I could guarantee this I could fund this project and depending on what I promise to be the results I could get right-wing money or left-wing money but what might we learn well we might learn to what extent these cemeteries are structured you know there's looking at these snips these single nucleotide polymorphisms we may find out about biological relationships between the better these different kinds of cemeteries and find out is this a single population with different cultural practices or are they really different populations we might find out are they're distinct cultural groups is there a difference or men in these cemeteries not so much related to the women in the cemeteries these are some of the things we might learn including is there continuity between pre and post migration lungo Bartek cemeteries not that they're necessary long go bards and we may very well find that the longer bards have the same genetic profile as the Romans that in fact they in one could hypothesize they're simply provincials that was part of the Roman Empire who now coming home challenges in this little project international cross-disciplinary collaboration collaboration true collaboration not just using each other as an auxilary science as a hell for a helper to plug in data educating geneticists historians archaeologists on what we do what are the limits of our disciplines what are the problems that we face they means a lot of time talking together we've had some long meetings we're having some longer meetings just to talk about our disciplines not that we're going to become geneticists or archaeologists but we have to learn what this is we have to demystify the other discipline but also calm people down about their fears this is a killer getting valid sequence data from all specimens is always a nightmare and this has been a problem for a long time developing model to recover the probable histories it's hard enough with with Auditor with the non recumbent DNA it's a nightmare with DNA that in theory could recombine every generation then every point in theory every locus on the genome could have its own genealogy 3 billion points it really eats up a lot of computer time so our mathematicians have to simplify this for us and make it easy finding the $450,000 please lock the doors nobody leaves without the contribution what is the payoff in all this I think we will create a model for rigorous examination of population changes people are working toward it we're not the only ones that we're the only ones trying to do something on this scale but we need something that is replicable we're going to learn best practices and share it and we will share our database we're going to create an ancient DNA database which absolutely does not exist there are other groups that are beginning tentatively to do this and we want to link to them so the one could eventually have a map of ancient DNA in this period I hope we'll have a model for reinterpreting historical and archaeological evidence along with genomic evidence it's not that this is going to replace that but they must be interconnected and we have to show how that can be done I hope beyond the the process it will start estimating diversity across the boundaries we're not looking for essentialism Romans lumbered barbarians Franks we're looking we're trying to preserve the diversity the hybridity of Europe's populations on both sides of the boundaries of this world perhaps we can start estimating numbers of those who actually did move n or possibly moved out was it elite migration was it culture transfer are there significant population movements and probably the answer is it depends on where but at least we can start that possibly an estimate of the lasting demographic impact if any of these this is my dream but it may not happen a started separating historical from political interpretations of antiquity will never get beyond it but but we're trying new ways of understanding the complexity the heterogeneity the malleability of Europe's population in the past and just maybe perhaps we'll be able to say something that is useful for us in a dynamic way about the present in the future thank you so much you're willing to answer a few questions I didn't think I had a choice yes this is Albin by the way he's later murdered by his wife whose father he murdered I'm really interesting thank you so much I was wondering early on you made a really big point about not being able to trust ancient DNA because I've been so solid for so many reasons how are you going to trust the ancient DNA you're going to use depends on what you mean by trust the ancient DNA there are various ways to interpret that do we believe that what we're getting is actually the DNA of these people who died in 580 that's a major question early ancient DNA analyses whether it was of mammoths or prehistoric bison or Neanderthals with actually the DNA of the scientist doing the analysis contamination is an enormous problem in ancient DNA fortunately in the lat I mean this is a very rapidly moving field and in the last 10 years there have been significant advances made that in a way actually uses the degradation of the DNA as a control if the DNA is too good it obviously isn't good it's recent so there are ways it is we're doing we're taking from each one we're taking three samples sequencing is done in totally different laboratories laboratory in Barcelona is doing it as well as our lab if the result conflict then there's obviously a problem so trusting DNA in that way it is a real problem there are other statistical ways of judging that this is ancient DNA rather than modern being but this is a very deep technical problem that my geneticists in the team are very aware of and working very hard to to control but that's one thing the other question of trusting ancient DNA meaning that this is telling us something significant about the population well that's the same problem as trusting written texts and archaeological texts and you know texts don't lie but people lie with texts so it's a question of knowing what to ask you know all we're looking at are variations in what will be printed out as terabytes of of letters and one question is are we actually getting the sequence that actually exists in the genome the other question is what does it mean and there we can't simply say its meaning is obvious unlike the humanists failure to find meaning it's when we look at it as once we started analyzing it then we have to work together as a team so that we can come up with a trustworthy explanation of what this means so both are issues trusting ancient DNA is is problematic and I guarantee you that our results will be disputed by other scholars by other geneticists by other historians and by the archaeologists just the nature of what we do thank you for the question hi hello was excellent talk I'm an economic historian ancient economic historian and you mentioned the interdisciplinary approach let me just to proffer the ideas of the Barbarian point the so-called barbarian coins of the period you're discussing there there might be some way of including that in these studies and second of the second quick comment remember in Europe I picked up some trashy Nazi pamphlet it's 5,000 years of Deutsche Cold War and I'm wondering whether what could compare these things to this and last but not least those interesting a female jewelry the fibula that they held the pins that held up the togas I one could buy them on ebay what a few when they're painted enameled but I've gotten the ones that were broken for five or ten dollars of course they could be fakes but for ten dollars well let's hope they're fakes but certainly when I talk about historical sources or archaeological sources I mean that a very broad sense so numismatics is certainly a part of the issue you know these peoples are not menteng coins at the time that they are doing this but there's a very interesting barbarian coins or medallions that are produced outside of the empire some of them copying roman forms some of them actually better quality silver than they're there they would say they're counterfeit except that they're their finest is greater than the Roman coins that they're counterfeiting so then you have yes yeah well there there are a lot of questions about the flow of precious metals and these people tend to be and all of this stuff that they've got all of this gold and silver they're buried in their tombs these beautiful swords this is the Emperor's gold this they are being paid either in service to the empire there the Roman army or they are getting it in as a part of a treaty in which the Romans find is cheaper to send them gold than to fight them they would pay for an army it's easier to bribe them off so there is a lot to be done with the float with the existence of precious metals within these societies and also weights from and metallurgical analyses very interesting where is a goal come from is it mined locally for example in the Iberian Peninsula or is it coming from the eastern Mediterranean or even beyond and the same with the jewelry where are the stones coming from some of the stones are coming from Sri Lanka pretty extraordinary others are local so there's a lot this is the kind of technical complexity that is involved in what we do and we're just adding another layer of complexity so this is not a genomic project all genomes all the time that's just one more little Trace we have the written evidence archeological evidence now we're going to add genetic evidence and not one does not Trump the other and they tell different parts of the story and you cannot answer questions about culture and identity through genomics just as we can't answer questions about a population movement through our texts so we just have to work together how are you dealing or planning to deal with the media and with various political groups or nationalist groups that take interest in this this is this is a very serious problem and this is a problem that has already begun some people are saying oh Gary's trying to get the lumber gene there is an immediate reaction oh this is racial essentializing this guy is going back to the 1930s I hope no one here is going to go out and report that this this talk is being videotaped will be on the Internet so it'll be very interesting if anyone looks at it to see what kind of fan mail and hate mail I receive as our project produces results inevitably it is likely to be picked up and will be involved in people we use it as ammunition and that is right and there are that's it's a problem in how do scholars interface with their contemporary world we have our personal beliefs we have what we do what happens I've gone on record I have written a book called the myth of Nations which gives a pretty good idea of where I stand on these population identities and so forth what if I find that these are absolutely tight endogenous communities that have held together for centuries and move massively into the Roman Empire and preserve their identity which is exactly what I don't think happened it'll be interesting for me I don't think it'll happen but there are other people in the team who pretty much believe that that's what happened and as I enlisted them I said well let's get the data so that we can discuss it once you get to the public sphere what I get vilas will do with this what ethnic nationalists might do with this we simply be have to be careful about how we discuss the der the the importance of the past for the present but the fundamental difference between the two history is a study of change in human society over time it is not the search for primordial identities and whatever this population was in the 6th century it is not what we are today and that's simply the reality but there is a very strong desire within certain parts not only of Europe but the world to erase past and present and have an eternal moment I I fully agree that there could be problems fortunately there is no longer barred nationalist movement and because this is being taped and televised I will not I will not have podcast I will not talk about those that do exist and those groups that we might have studied but we decided not to because the moment we would try to we would run into serious problems in getting our hands on the data or getting some of our international colleagues in a lot of trouble if they collaborated nobody is really holding out for the longer parts so they kind of passed under the radar I hope what we will have is a model that can be applied then to study other population changes in other places and I hope that what we are preserving particularly with our work in autosomal DNA is complexity hybridity this is not tracing your mother back to Eva your father back to Adam this is looking at the complexity of these people as well as the complexity of those that produce them and those that came after and I suspect that if this goes forward it will be abused but that's also part of being a contemporary intellectual in the world and so we'll have to go on talk shows and and try to explain we'll get Robert to explain because he's much better at that what we're doing here but inevitably you get mixed up in this when you talk about these issues to what extent is our genetic differences in these fairly recent people's sufficient to enable 1/2 an hour to analyze the migrations of these people in particular those where the migrations are known like the Vikings going into southern Italy or or the well that's a very good question obviously real mutation takes place randomly but over centuries millennia and so one question is will with any difference these people are just like us there are there we're not going to see evolutionary differences here they're people who are studying the and earth all DNA and finding out how much Neanderthal how much of the Neanderthal genome is present in us and some of us know people that we think have more than than others but that's here we're looking at very small differences we looked at the hyper variable region one of the mitochondria because that is an area that is known to undergo a lot of changes in a fairly short period of time that study that I criticized for its data using the lose on material although the data I think is very weak the science is actually very strong and their attempt to look at segments the recombination does not happen at every point of the genome in every moment but it happens by segments and they have some very interesting ways of trying to estimate time based on length of identity by a common identity by descent and so there are mathematical ways that we think we may be able to see the symbol at their similarities if we're looking deeply enough if we're just looking at the mitochondria in y-chromosomal DNA then as somebody said the european gene pool has been a vegetable soup since the Paleolithic at least there is no difference there is no real difference but if you look today at a map a genetic map showing genetic distance again not modelled but just using principal component analysis looking at thousands of loci in the genome you actually call a one of our participants John November published a very interesting article in Nature in which simply look at some plotting genetic distance on a two-dimensional graph he replicated Europe's geographical map you can see Scandinavia you can see England you can see the Iberian Peninsula even though he's using the same lousy database from Lausanne if he had really good data it would be fascinating but so we know that there is sufficient difference in modern DNA to find it what he does not find or lots of isolates evidence of big migrations moving into an area it the extraordinary discovery is that people tend to have sex with people that they're close to think about it and the result is that it's a very gradual process and we've done I participate in a study in which people thought maybe the sorbs it's a Slovak isolate commune around Leipzig where maybe the Serbs and that that was part of the great Serbian nation which had been cut off by Germans and so forth and in fact they fit pretty much where they should be their slight isolate they're a little closer to Bohemia on Poland but they'd pretty much fit where they should so you can do them out the question is what would we have during the so called migration period but we have the same even map and the the Lombards would in northern Italy would just look like the rest of northern Italy and they would not look like Hungary we don't know it's an interesting question but it's pause using next-generation sequencing to get rich enough data from even ancient DNA to pose these questions and ask me after I get my four hundred and fifty thousand dollars and I hope I can answer it Patrick and well have all that really want to thank you for fascinating and also very entertaining and funny lecture are confronting us with in many ways what what we do not know and just your dazzling complexity of all the various different approaches and and angles and problems and I must say it's very comforting that all of this is coming back coming together in the mind of a single historian a particular historian here at the IAS so thank you again and really I would like to invite all of you to attend the reception in pulled whole thank you

Channel: aoflex

Views: 53,842

Keywords: Institute for Advanced Study, lecture, seminar, History (Literary School Or Movement), Migration Period (Event), Patrick Geary, Historical Studies, history, genetic data, evolution, population dynamics, geneticists, Historians, Barbarian, computational genetics, Genetics (Field Of Study)

Id: QgcQKOT5MKA

Length: 77min 2sec (4622 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2013