The Late Antique and Early Medieval Genomic Legacy of Europeans

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The aim of this project is to investigate the genomic variability of the epoch at the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (300-600 AD) in order to determine the long-term effect of the human populations of this period on the population structure of Europe today. Viminacium was an ancient city in what is now Serbia and, as a historical melting pot, is ideally suited for such an investigation, since a wide variety of cultural groups met here in one place, and skeletons are both numerous and excellently preserved biomolecularly. In a first step, graves from different necropolises of Viminacium will be archaeologically and anthropologically investigated in order to subsequently generate a total of 100 palaeogenomes at 1x sequencing depth. Of these, 20 will be selected, representing both the most important cultural groups and the overall observed genetic variability of the site, and then sequenced to a higher sequencing depth (10x). These will be used as anchor points for subsequent demographic modelling, primarily using the ancestral recombination graph and the fastsimcoal approach. From the best models, demographic parameter values that shaped the frontier society at different points in time will be inferred. The team, consisting of population geneticists, anthropologists and archaeologists, will then investigate the historical implications of the demographic models and parameters. In a final step, the results of the historical model will be transferred into a demographic model on the origin of today's Europeans to determine the long-term impact of Late Antique and Early Medieval variability on today's genetic diversity in different parts of Europe.