Roman rule changed the Balkans. Later migrations helped shape the ancestry of the people living there today.

A 2023 ancient-DNA study traced this story across the first millennium AD, reporting 136 new ancient Balkan genomes.

Under early Roman rule, many sampled people retained ancestry similar to earlier local Balkan populations. There was little detectable input related to pre-Imperial Italian populations—but substantial migration from the empire's east. About one-third of 45 early Roman individuals had predominantly western Anatolian or, in one case, northern Levantine ancestry.

From roughly AD 250–550, newcomers brought Central/Northern European and steppe-related ancestry, often already mixed. Then, by around AD 700, a much larger Eastern European-related signal appeared across the sampled regions, associated with Slavic migrations that had begun earlier.

Women moved too. At Nuštar in Croatia, a mother had about 90% Eastern European-related ancestry and her son 64%, pointing to a father with a more mixed background.

That migration left a lasting legacy. The study's models estimated roughly 50–60% Eastern European-related ancestry in sampled Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Romanians; 30–40% in mainland Greek groups; and 4–20% in sampled Aegean island groups. Earlier Balkan and Roman-era Anatolian roots also survived.

These are model estimates using ancient reference groups, not literal percentages of a fixed “Slavic ethnicity.” DNA does not establish which language a person spoke. Urban burial sites are overrepresented, and sparse sixth-century samples leave the earliest migration phases less clear.

📚 Source: Olalde et al. (2023), Cell
A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

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