How Large-Scale Human Migration Reshaped Europe More Than a Thousand Years Ago

As Europe reached the end of the Roman Empire, the world changed and new types of languages ​​and cultures emerged. There was a power vacuum to fill in a now-vanished part of the Roman Empire. Many also yearned for a simpler way of life outside of Roman society.

Thus began a great migration.

We don’t know for sure why these populations began migrating so quickly and widely, but we have some ideas. As increasing pressures from a crumbling empire, a changing climate, and other factors arose, populations began to move. And this change would change the face of Europe as we know it.

Learn more: What a 1.5-million-year-old face reveals about early human migrations

Why the Great Migration Happened

In the second half of the first millennium, from 501 to 1000 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire sought soldiers from outside its territories to defend its empire. New groups of migrants from the East arrived to establish their own power structures and found their own societies.

Migrant groups were also attracted to a better way of life, with access to land and resources still present in Roman territories. At the same time, it was getting colder in parts of Asia and these migrants were looking for a climate more suited to their cultures and way of life, said Joscha Gretzinger, a German researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Discover.

There was also pressure from the Huns, a nomadic group from Central Asia, who began to invade and pressure populations to move west. Epidemics occurring at this time also reduced populations in Western Europe, leaving the land open to large-scale migrations from the East.

“It was just a logical idea to go west and south into this empty territory,” Gretzinger said. Discover. He adds that it was probably a combination of factors that led to people migrating to new lands and adopting new ways of life.

A new world after the fall of the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was huge and its fall did not happen at the same time, according to British. While Constantinople and Anatolia would endure for hundreds of years more, parts of Italy and France would become home to foreigners coming from Germany and the East to populate the cities and change society. These societies would become simpler and less hierarchical with fewer taxes and little division of labor.

“These were self-sufficient local communities with virtually no supportable objects,” said Walter Pohl, a historian of science and medieval history at the University of Vienna. Discover.

Research published by Gretzinger and Pohl in Nature went further, taking a genetic perspective to examine whether these populations mixed or inhabited the same land but remained mostly separate. Researchers found that they sometimes lived completely separate lives and that the DNA in some graves was monolithic, but in others it was mixed, Pohl said.

For example, the Avars migrated from Asia to Central Europe between the 6th and 9th centuries because they were defeated by the Turks, Pohl said. This migration was considered one of the fastest in premodern times.

“This group mixed with local people very hesitantly; it was a slow process,” Pohl said. Discover.

This could also be the result of the Avars taking many of their women with them on this perilous 5,000 km journey across Asia to Europe. Additionally, they might have had higher status than the groups they inhabited.

We know this because when they intermarried, it was more likely that a higher-status man would marry a lower-status woman so he could convert her to the right religion, which is less likely to happen the other way around, Pohl said. On the other hand, Slavic groups from northeastern Europe mixed much more easily with the local population.

Pohl explained that what we learn from the genetic side of the coin is that some groups have mixed and others have not, meaning that many nationalist ideas about being full-blooded and related to certain groups are not always genetically accurate. Most of us are made up of all kinds of people, not just one.

Learn more: Ancient Romans were among the first unpleasant tourists

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