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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2022 5:54:09 GMT
Gold coin proves 'fake' Roman emperor was real - BBC News
BBC News
An ancient gold coin proves that a third century Roman emperor written out of history as a fictional character really did exist, scientists have said.
The coin bearing the name of Sponsian and his portrait was found more than 300 years ago in Transylvania, once a far-flung outpost of the Roman empire.
Believed to be a fake, it had been locked away in a museum cupboard.
Now scientists have said scratch marks visible under a microscope prove that it was in circulation 2,000 years ago.
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2022 22:01:23 GMT
Prof Paul Pearson University College London, who led the research, told BBC News that he was astonished by the discovery. "What we have found is an emperor. He was a figure thought to have been a fake and written off by the experts," he said. "But we think he was real and that he had a role in history." The coin at the centre of the story was among a small hoard discovered in 1713. It was thought to have been a genuine Roman coin until the mid-19th century, when experts suspected that they might have been produced by forgers of the time, because of their crude design. The final blow came in 1863 when Henry Cohen, the leading coin expert of the time at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, considered the problem for his great catalogue of Roman coins. He said that they were not only 'modern' fakes, but poorly made and "ridiculously imagined". Other specialists agreed and to this day Sponsian has been dismissed in scholarly catalogues. But Prof Pearson suspected otherwise when he saw photographs of the coin while researching for a book about the history of the Roman empire. He could make out scratches on its surface that he thought might have been produced by the coin being in circulation. He contacted the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University where the coin had been kept locked away in a cupboard along with three others from the original hoard, and asked if he could work with the researchers there. They examined all four coins under a powerful microscope and confirmed in the journal, PLOS 1, that there really were scratches, and the patterns were consistent with them being jingled around in purses. A chemical analysis also showed that the coins had been buried in soil for hundreds of years, according to Jesper Ericsson, who is the museum's curator of coins and worked with Prof Pearson on the project. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274285
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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2023 18:08:21 GMT
Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores Abstract We analysed 127 Ancient Roman genomes with a view to understanding the possible reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Taking the polygenic score for educational attainment (EA4) as a proxy for intelligence, we find that intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27) and increases in Late Antiquity (Z= 0.25) and is approximately at the same level today (Z= 0.08). We show that this is congruent with a cyclical model of civilization based around intelligence, with the documented history of Rome, and also with patterns of immigration into Rome. openpsych.net/paper/73/
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Post by Admin on Aug 3, 2023 17:29:07 GMT
Local population structure in Cambridgeshire during the Roman occupation Abstract The Roman period saw the empire expand across Europe and the Mediterranean, including much of what is today the United Kingdom. While there is written evidence of high mobility into and out of Britain for administrators, traders and the military, the impact of imperialism on local population structure is invisible in the textual record. The extent of genetic change that occurred in Britain before the Early Medieval Period and how closely linked by genetic kinship the local populations were, remains underexplored. Here, using genome-wide data from 52 ancient individuals from Cambridgeshire, we show low levels of genetic ancestry differentiation between Romano-British sites and lower levels of runs of homozygosity over 4 centimorgans (cM than in the Bronze Age and Neolithic. We find fourteen cases of genetic relatedness within and one between sites without evidence of patrilineal dominance and one case of temporary mobility within a family unit during the Late Romano-British period. We also show that the modern patterns of genetic ancestry composition in Modern Britain emerged after the Roman period. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.31.551265v1
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