Greece & Rome · AD 400–700 · Altheim near Landshut, Bavaria and Hesse, Germany
Ancient DNA shows northern Europeans settled on Rome's German frontier before its fall
Genomes from 258 people buried in Bavaria and Hesse between AD 400 and 700 show northern Europeans arrived before Rome's collapse and merged with provincial populations after about 470.
Peer-reviewed paper
Altheim near Landshut, Germany People with northern European ancestry were already living on Rome's frontier in what is now southern Germany before the Western Empire collapsed, and they mixed with the provincial population only after Roman rule ended around AD 470. That is the conclusion of a genetic study of 258 people buried between AD 400 and 700 in Bavaria and Hesse. The authors say the results do not fit the old picture of large Germanic tribes migrating into former Roman lands.
The study was led by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and published in Nature. About sixty researchers from Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy and other countries took part. The senior author is the anthropologist and population geneticist Joachim Burger, and the first authors are the JGU geneticists Jens Blöcher and Leonardo Vallini. The team sequenced genomes from skeletons and compared them with a database of nearly 2,900 ancient and modern genomes from northern and southern Germany. Strontium isotope analysis of the bones gave extra information on people's mobility and origins.
The burials come from row cemeteries (Reihengräberfelder), burial grounds with graves laid out in rows that spread from the mid-5th century across northern Gaul, western and southern Germania and as far as present-day Hungary. Historians have long read them as the archaeological trace of the Völkerwanderung, the supposed migration of Germanic peoples.
In the Late Roman phase, before imperial power in the West finally collapsed, these cemeteries already held people whose genomes point clearly to northern Europe. The clearest cases are at Altheim, near Landshut in Lower Bavaria, and Büttelborn, near Darmstadt in Hesse. Blöcher said that at first glance this seems to confirm the traditional migration story, but that deeper analysis gave a different picture. According to Vallini, these people had arrived in small groups long before the fall of the Empire. They adopted a Roman way of life but lived apart from the rest of the population for generations, probably as agricultural workers, and married almost only among themselves.
The authors suggest Roman law may explain this separation. Foreign contingents were often given land under strict conditions, including limits on marriage, so that the state could control their integration. The team also genetically characterised the population of a Roman fort in southern Germany for the first time. It was a very mixed civilian and military community that had absorbed influences from across Europe and even Asia.
Mixing after the collapse
The authors place the turning point around 470, when the state structures of the Western Empire broke down. Burger describes people leaving cities, villas and military settlements for the countryside, where they met the groups of northern origin. The two populations then quickly formed new communities and buried their dead together in the row cemeteries. Genetic diversity in the cemeteries rose sharply, with people of Roman provincial ancestry from southern and southeastern Europe joining the same communities. The researchers found no clear match between a person's ancestry and the grave goods buried with them.
There is a certain continuity of Late Antiquity population components, but now groups that previously remained separate merge with each other.
Joachim Burger, population geneticist, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
The historians on the project, led by Steffen Patzold of the University of Tübingen with his colleagues Mischa Meier and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, say the data rule out migration by large, closed tribal groups in the region studied.
Our results confirm with completely new scientific data that the traditional image of a 'Völkerwanderung' of massive, closed groups is simply false for the region we studied. The genomic data point instead to movements of small groups.
Steffen Patzold, Professor of Medieval History, University of Tübingen
By the early 7th century the population was already genetically close to present-day Central Europeans, although the northern component gradually gained weight.
Families and lifespans
The team reconstructed family trees from the genomes. Households were mostly nuclear families rather than large clans. Most people had children with a single partner, unions between close relatives were absent, and there was no sign of levirate marriage, in which a widow marries her dead husband's brother. Descent was traced through both the female and male lines. Patzold says these patterns match what Late Antique written sources describe. Burger argues that the speed at which the two groups intermarried shows they already shared a common culture, which he identifies as Late Roman culture.
Using a new method to estimate birth and death dates, the researchers calculated a life expectancy of 43.3 years for men and 39.8 years for women, and an average generation time of about 28 years. About 10 per cent of boys and 8 per cent of girls died by the age of twelve. Nearly a quarter of children lost at least one parent by the age of ten, but most had at least one grandparent alive when they were born.
Isotope results show that a minority of people were born outside the local area, and that early migrants were often women. Some distant relatives were buried more than 200 or even 500 kilometres apart. The osteological and isotope analyses were carried out at the anthropological collection of the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History in Munich, where the anthropologists Michaela Harbeck and Maren Velte played a key role in the study.
Our analyses of bone structure and specific chemical signatures in the bones provided supplementary information on the mobility and origins of people at that time. These confirm the genetic findings.
Maren Velte, anthropologist, Bavarian State Collections of Natural History
Over the period studied, mobility declined and communities became more locally rooted.
Sources
- The Barbarians Who Didn’t Invade Rome: Groups from Northern Europe Were Already Plowing the Lands of Southern Germany a Century Before the Fall of the Empire (La Brújula Verde)
- Skeleton Study Reveals Life on the Frontier After the Fall of Rome (Archaeology Magazine)
- The Birth of Medieval Europe Revealed by Ancient DNA (Medievalists.net)
- Ancient DNA study rewrites fall of Rome, reveals small migrations shaped Central Europe (Archaeology News)
Paper: Blöcher, J., Vallini, L., Velte, M. et al. Demography and life histories across the Roman frontier in Germany 400–700 CE. Nature (2026). doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10437-3
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