Gene of thrones: genomes of rulers reveal how empires rose and fell

Discover the mysteries of ancient empires through palaeogenomics, revealing secrets of migration, society, and elite rulers.

Empires of old are shrouded in mystery and are the subject of intense historical investigation. Given the enormous time scales and the lack of written records, accurate details of most founders of these empires have been lost to the vagaries of oral history. Many of them have been turned into legends, their life stories left to be pieced together from various fables.

Some scholars have held that most ancient empires started out as smaller nomadic groups that went on to assimilate various tribal units, under the leadership of a small, elite nucleus often made up of certain families. These elite individuals and the societies they shaped bonded through war, disease outbreaks, and large-scale migration to lay the foundations of large protectorates.

They are now being slowly brought into view by items from graves at archaeological sites, including the remains of human burials and silver, gold, and other artefacts, and the increasingly advanced tools and methods scientists are using to pry their secrets from them.

Palaeogenomics — the analysis of ancient DNA from archaeological sites — is an important way for scientists to understand the past. For example, they have investigated the genomes of individuals from the now-extinct Paleo-Eskimo, the first culture known to settle in Greenland, to reveal their migration from Siberia to the New World around 5,500 years ago. Ancient DNA from the world’s tropical regions has been a challenge to study because the skeletal remains that host them decay rapidly in the warm, wet weather. Nevertheless, advances in palaeogenomics allowed researchers to obtain and sequence the genome of a 4000-year-old strand of hair belonging to an individual from the Middle Nile Valley in eastern Africa, allowing them to unravel the history of population dispersal on the continent.

Studies involving human DNA from the Bronze Age in Eurasia have provided clues about the routes along which people migrated, how their various cultures and languages mixed, and even how some of them developed lactose intolerance.

Palaeogenomics has significantly improved our knowledge of human evolution, spread, and development. To recognise his efforts to establish this discipline, Svante Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022.

Today, researchers are able to elicit from ancient DNA particular details about ancient human societies as well. For example, the Avars, a mysterious group of horse-riding warriors, ruled vast swaths of modern-day Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, and Serbia for more than two centuries. They helped end the Roman empire and dominated large parts of Europe in the 6th century AD.