Comment by bee_rider
1 year ago
That caused me to re-read the article. Actually it is surprisingly ambiguous on that point inside the text of the article, with wording like
> the human remains likely belonged to soldiers who died during a battle involving ancient Roman legionaries.
Doesn’t say which side they were on. The most direct bit seems to be
> X-ray images of the sheath revealed typical ancient Roman decorations: silver wire inlays […]
But a German could just have traded with a Roman at some point.
Of course, the headline says they are Roman soldiers. I wonder if it is hard to tell definitively.
A simple DNA test should tell us. Roman soldiers were recruited from a diverse gene pool and fought far from their birthplace in mixed groups. A simple test to determine the average variance of genetics will let us know if they were a single ethnicity. Further cross references to compare similarity to other known genomes can tell us which region an individual was from.
Whole genetic sequencing cost about $500. So <$75,000 for the sequencing of the entire 150, plus scientist time to gather samples and process results. Answering the question through genetics probably costs more than $250,000 even with cheap grad student labor, so it's probably just not worth it, especially when the moral high ground is to let the dead rest.
Sequencing 2K years old material is not that easy, specially WGS. From what I've been told, both from degradation and contamination, you're going to need much, much more samples and work than when doing a regular $500 sequencing.
You can do simpler procedures to find their general regional origin, although it always requires more work in those conditions.
Edit: Wien Museum press release says they're doing DNA and isotope analysis, but doesn't say the concrete techniques applied.
Thanks for lifting me above the Dunning-Kruger threshold so that I understand there is more to archaeological genetics then I previously conceived of.
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Most likely They are not going to be allowed to rest at all. Especially western humanity is basically sanitizing the whole earth below them of human culture and history and storing it away in boxes and vaults, and ephemeral digital files of dubious quality, centralized for some Library of Alexandria or Dresden Bombing atrocity to totally erase all the centralized records of humanity.
No one seems to think of these types of things, especially in todays world where everything is digital and even in places like America there will be nothing left but rather uninteresting rubbish piles of plastic and other toxic remains left where stick and drywall houses and junky metal warehouses used to be.
There will be no silver lined sheathes of common soldiers, no coins of any kind, let alone gold ones, there will be no hidden manuscripts, not even charred scrolls that could be recovered with the use of AI. There will not even be any buildings and castles that stood the test of time for 1000 years, or any new pyramids because it rich and successful don’t build grand and permanent anythings. Humanity will effectively have not only left a huge hole in history starting in about the 1980s, but there won’t even be anything left to discover in the ground from the past the way we are going. And worst, even the digital history is clearly starting to come under attack with censorship and deletion and even the IP rules where corporations just get to delete what they dem you should no longer have.
TBH I agree that we Americans are going to leave behind some really lame plastic artifacts. But I’m trying not to worry about that sort of thing too much, it doesn’t seem healthy to worry too much about what’ll happen long after we’re dead. If we do, we might forget to live, right?
Despite all that it has become much easier to copy vast quantities of information. A modest effort to archive by future generations could deliver far more than was previously possible through discovery of antiquities. And paper products are still produced in vast quantities.
Sir, this is a Wendys.
We are on the precipice of a new space age.
Where you should put your horizon is Psyche 16.
Space-factories building Starships for everyone. New iPhones dropping from the sky.
Earth, returned to Eden.
The Roman empire at this time made massive use of auxiliaries - ie not Romans. These are soldiers from conquered lands. Mercenaries were also used a lot. Mercs are soldiers for hire rather than hired soldiers!
Auxiliaries might be closer to slaves than soldiers and mercenaries might have fewer rights than auxiliaries. The devil is in the details. Auxiliaries might be granted Roman Citizenship at commencement or after a period of service.
In general the policy was to deploy aux. from the other end of the empire to augment your top troops in a particular war theatre. Mercs were used to top up if available - think of them as Uber or Lyft when you've run out of decent taxis 8)
Ideally you'd expend your aux and mercs carefully, to keep your real killers (heavy infantry) going. However its just not that simple, depending on what you (Roman General) had at your disposal in terms of troops. It also depended on you not being daft and throwing your cavalry up hill at pointy sticks or whatever. "Skirmishers" can also be devastating:
The Germans (have a look at my username - yes I'm English) german - might mean spearman (I was told this by a bloke from Bayern). They were skirmishers - no armour and a big pointy stick and a buckler shield. They brought low several Roman legions.
Anyway. The term Legionary is a tricky one. And so is German and quite a few other terms here.