22 Comments
Jul 5, 2023Liked by Peter Nimitz

Great article as always!

I have two questions:

1). Is the Roman population decline due to contraceptives noticable? How large would the effect have been? How different would contraceptive use have been between the core Roman population and the Roman colonies (maybe explaining the dominance of the Illyrian emperors)?

2). Why did migrant communities in Rome decline so much after the crisis of the third century? Was there no diaspora effect that supported these communities? Did they just die on the vine?

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Excellent work, Nemets. Do you have any guesses for how large the migration from the Eastern Mediterranean to Italy was? Considering urban fertility sinks I imagine it was large & consistent until incentives broke down during the Crisis of the Third Century.

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Great work as always, thank you. One thing I'm still unclear on is, where the peoples of the Roman Kingdom and Republic mostly Indo-European descendants?

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It's interesting that West asian migrants (syrians, jews and anatolians) are so well represented in the urban populations of the Empire but egyptians are not depite high population numbers in Egypt. Greeks were just ubiquitous everywhere including in pre-roman South Italy.

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Are you sure about the sicily part in every genetic paper I saw their Nafri % is pretty low, in the paper you posted they’re modelled with extremely low ANF ancestry which is kinda weird, maybe the proxy they used was an outlier with heavy ANF admixture?

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Still planning on that podcast appearance to discuss future Western demographics, Nemets?

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