Imperial Romans were nothing like Republican Romans. The Republican Romans were demographically replaced almost in their entirety.
While the Italic Republican Romans were genetically similar to Southern French or Northern Spaniards, the Imperial Romans contained significant Middle Eastern ancestry (Levantine and Anatolian, in addition to Greek) and were closest to Greek Islanders and Cypriots.
When Alexander conquered the Middle East it turned many parts of that world culturally Greek. The Hellenized groups, especially from Anatolia and the Levant, moved to Greece so that in a short amount of time Hellenistic Greece became overwhelmingly Middle Eastern in ancestry.
These groups moved into Italy and in fact there are historical attestations regarding this. Of course they didn't do DNA tests for ancestry back then, they just considered them all to be Greeks.
There is an unpublished study of DNA from ancient Greeks, and it shows a similar pattern: a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Greeks from Neolithic to Mycenaean times, followed by a sharp drop at some point before modern times. I initially wanted to reference that study but was advised against doing so (by the study's author). The sample size is small (29) and we don't know when exactly that decline occurred in ancient Greeks.
It's likely that the Roman Empire in its entirety, and not just the Italian peninsula, was affected by the decline in cognitive ability.
The DNA data is from David's Reich lab and is now online. I can't really say more because the author told me not to reference his study in my article. I think he wants to redo it with a larger dataset.
It wasn't Christianity that made people less violent. It was the State, specifically the State monopoly on violence. Christianity was a consequence, rather than a cause, of this societal pacification.
The State monopoly on violence collapsed in the 5th century and then gradually reasserted itself from the 11th century onward. I've written on this subject elsewhere:
Frost, P. & H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 13(1): 230-243. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491501300114
> This was when the Empire was expanding and building roads, aqueducts, and fortifications. Much less had been achieved during the time of the Republic. How do we explain the apparent contradiction?
Well, there was also the fact that accomplishments were high during the early era, and declined subsequently.
There were a lot of written observations even from ancient sources about the decline of reason and its replacement by superstition and "patriotic propaganda" during 3C.
Notably, the quality of portraiture in Roman coins started falling from the Crisis of the Third Century and collapsed during 5C. (You can observe this in numismatics sections of most any Mediterranean history museum). There's a lot of cope to the effect that it was cultural and had something to do with the spread of Christian iconographic traditions, or shortages of the metals in question, but the simplest explanation is that coiners became less skilled, competent, and conscientious.
I agree. On the other hand, an Empire can mobilize more human resources than a small country. We see this with the US. Although its mean cognitive ability is declining and has probably been declining since the early 20th century, it can still attract the world's finest minds to its universities and research centers.
In the case of the Roman Empire, it was able to mobilize human resources not only from within its borders but also from outside. In the end, that strategy proved to be its undoing, notably in the case of foreign mercenaries.
Does this mean that Roman Republic IQ's were around 110 IQ? That makes their lack of scientific innovation even more incomprehensible. In this respect, the Romans resemble the ancient East Asian civilizations more than they do the Greeks: high IQ (and some technological advancements) but not as much scientific innovation.
I think that Galton was probably right and that the average Athenian citizen's IQ must have been around 115-120 IQ at its peak. He was right about most everything, after all. Alexandrian Greeks were probably not far off either, given their extremely important contributions in science and mathematics (assuming most of the people involved were born in Alexandria itself). I have no clue why Anatoly Karlin thinks otherwise: the Greeks invented most everything in the arts and sciences.
Yes, mean IQ may have been around 110 during the time of Roman Republic, although there is still no consensus on how to translate polygenic scores into IQ scores.
Scientific innovation is made possible by fruitful interaction among large numbers of intelligent people. It is thus a function not only of the proportion of people who surpass a certain level of cognitive ability but also of their absolute number, as well as their ability to communicate with each other. Thus, the Scientific Revolution was made possible not only by the large pool of intelligent British "savants" but also by their colleagues on the continent.
The population of the Roman Republic was around 4 million. By comparison, Great Britain already had over 9 million in 1700.
Yeah, but the Romans clearly were not interested (perhaps not as capable?) in the more abstract inquiries of the Greeks: ontology, formal logic, mathematics, etc.
If possible, it would be interesting to compare the behavioral polygenic scores of the Greeks and Romans: neuroticism, extraversion, etc. If they share similar polygenic educational scores but differ in other polygenic scores, it might help explain the difference in their scientific/speculative achievements. There must be innate reasons for why the Romans, in spite of extensive communication with the Greeks, never seriously dealt with science and non-moralistic philosophy. Lucretius, one of the most speculative Romans, complained of Latin's unsophistication:
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing
(Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" from the Internet Classics Archive, MIT)
Even his famous poem does not deal with metaphysics like, say, Aristotle does. You really can't find people dealing with abstractions like Aristotle or, say, Archimedes in Roman thought. Even the literature of the Greeks is appears to be more speculative and abstract (i.e., the Argonautica vs the Aeneid). Perhaps the Persians were a more extreme example of the Romans. Conversely, certain endogamous groups in India (and possibly elsewhere) appear to have been more speculatively-minded: Indian philosophers developed sophisticated aesthetic and epistemological theories, possibly invented the first formal language (Panini's grammatical rules), etc.
Thank you for your work. Your blog has completely changed my understanding of the world. Hell, even the images in your blog posts have led me to view art/media through an anthropological lens.
Thank you! I hope to give voice to those who have passed on, and whose ideas may become lost -- in no small part because of the current political climate.
I agree that Roman philosophy was inferior to Greek philosophy. This might be due to a qualitative difference in cognitive ability between the two populations. Or it might simply reflect the smaller size of the Roman population during Republican times, in relation to the size of the Greek population. There is also the possibility of differential survival of philosophical writings: Greek manuscripts were preserved by the Eastern Roman Empire until Renaissance times, while Latin manuscripts were less able to survive the collapse of the Western Empire.
Once again Peter, you have published a fascinating and lucid story of Roman populations cognitive abilities. It was a pleasure to read. One question I have is if far more ancient Roman DNA is discovered in the future; say thousands of samples, instead of 127 and 102 sample groups respectively, do you think the distributions of mean intelligence would change much across the different time periods? And I know I've mentioned this before but it would be great to see you present your ideas in a video interview in 2024!
I would like to see more data from Late Antiquity. When, exactly, did mean cognitive ability start to rise again? This is a point on which I disagree with many other people. I believe it was associated with the rise of Christianity as a State religion. Others think it was caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire. I would also like to see data from the rest of the Roman Empire. We have some preliminary data from Greece, and it shows a similar pattern.
Yes, I should do video interviews. I just worry about having to come up with a quick answer to an unforeseen question. I also worry about whether I'll come across as hesitant or unsure.
You are missing by far the most important reason.
Imperial Romans were nothing like Republican Romans. The Republican Romans were demographically replaced almost in their entirety.
While the Italic Republican Romans were genetically similar to Southern French or Northern Spaniards, the Imperial Romans contained significant Middle Eastern ancestry (Levantine and Anatolian, in addition to Greek) and were closest to Greek Islanders and Cypriots.
When Alexander conquered the Middle East it turned many parts of that world culturally Greek. The Hellenized groups, especially from Anatolia and the Levant, moved to Greece so that in a short amount of time Hellenistic Greece became overwhelmingly Middle Eastern in ancestry.
These groups moved into Italy and in fact there are historical attestations regarding this. Of course they didn't do DNA tests for ancestry back then, they just considered them all to be Greeks.
There is an unpublished study of DNA from ancient Greeks, and it shows a similar pattern: a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Greeks from Neolithic to Mycenaean times, followed by a sharp drop at some point before modern times. I initially wanted to reference that study but was advised against doing so (by the study's author). The sample size is small (29) and we don't know when exactly that decline occurred in ancient Greeks.
It's likely that the Roman Empire in its entirety, and not just the Italian peninsula, was affected by the decline in cognitive ability.
Do you have access to the DNA samples from that paper, or at least the sites they come from?
I can do a deeper dive on the mean scores
Thanks
The DNA data is from David's Reich lab and is now online. I can't really say more because the author told me not to reference his study in my article. I think he wants to redo it with a larger dataset.
So, Christianity made people weak as well as Roman state did through genetic pacification? I wouldn't say medeival age Europeans were peaceful
It wasn't Christianity that made people less violent. It was the State, specifically the State monopoly on violence. Christianity was a consequence, rather than a cause, of this societal pacification.
The State monopoly on violence collapsed in the 5th century and then gradually reasserted itself from the 11th century onward. I've written on this subject elsewhere:
Frost, P. & H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 13(1): 230-243. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491501300114
Frost, P. (2010). The Roman State and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 8(3): 376-389. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491000800306
> This was when the Empire was expanding and building roads, aqueducts, and fortifications. Much less had been achieved during the time of the Republic. How do we explain the apparent contradiction?
Well, there was also the fact that accomplishments were high during the early era, and declined subsequently.
There were a lot of written observations even from ancient sources about the decline of reason and its replacement by superstition and "patriotic propaganda" during 3C.
Notably, the quality of portraiture in Roman coins started falling from the Crisis of the Third Century and collapsed during 5C. (You can observe this in numismatics sections of most any Mediterranean history museum). There's a lot of cope to the effect that it was cultural and had something to do with the spread of Christian iconographic traditions, or shortages of the metals in question, but the simplest explanation is that coiners became less skilled, competent, and conscientious.
I agree. On the other hand, an Empire can mobilize more human resources than a small country. We see this with the US. Although its mean cognitive ability is declining and has probably been declining since the early 20th century, it can still attract the world's finest minds to its universities and research centers.
In the case of the Roman Empire, it was able to mobilize human resources not only from within its borders but also from outside. In the end, that strategy proved to be its undoing, notably in the case of foreign mercenaries.
Does this mean that Roman Republic IQ's were around 110 IQ? That makes their lack of scientific innovation even more incomprehensible. In this respect, the Romans resemble the ancient East Asian civilizations more than they do the Greeks: high IQ (and some technological advancements) but not as much scientific innovation.
I think that Galton was probably right and that the average Athenian citizen's IQ must have been around 115-120 IQ at its peak. He was right about most everything, after all. Alexandrian Greeks were probably not far off either, given their extremely important contributions in science and mathematics (assuming most of the people involved were born in Alexandria itself). I have no clue why Anatoly Karlin thinks otherwise: the Greeks invented most everything in the arts and sciences.
Yes, mean IQ may have been around 110 during the time of Roman Republic, although there is still no consensus on how to translate polygenic scores into IQ scores.
Scientific innovation is made possible by fruitful interaction among large numbers of intelligent people. It is thus a function not only of the proportion of people who surpass a certain level of cognitive ability but also of their absolute number, as well as their ability to communicate with each other. Thus, the Scientific Revolution was made possible not only by the large pool of intelligent British "savants" but also by their colleagues on the continent.
The population of the Roman Republic was around 4 million. By comparison, Great Britain already had over 9 million in 1700.
Yeah, but the Romans clearly were not interested (perhaps not as capable?) in the more abstract inquiries of the Greeks: ontology, formal logic, mathematics, etc.
If possible, it would be interesting to compare the behavioral polygenic scores of the Greeks and Romans: neuroticism, extraversion, etc. If they share similar polygenic educational scores but differ in other polygenic scores, it might help explain the difference in their scientific/speculative achievements. There must be innate reasons for why the Romans, in spite of extensive communication with the Greeks, never seriously dealt with science and non-moralistic philosophy. Lucretius, one of the most speculative Romans, complained of Latin's unsophistication:
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing
(Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" from the Internet Classics Archive, MIT)
Even his famous poem does not deal with metaphysics like, say, Aristotle does. You really can't find people dealing with abstractions like Aristotle or, say, Archimedes in Roman thought. Even the literature of the Greeks is appears to be more speculative and abstract (i.e., the Argonautica vs the Aeneid). Perhaps the Persians were a more extreme example of the Romans. Conversely, certain endogamous groups in India (and possibly elsewhere) appear to have been more speculatively-minded: Indian philosophers developed sophisticated aesthetic and epistemological theories, possibly invented the first formal language (Panini's grammatical rules), etc.
Thank you for your work. Your blog has completely changed my understanding of the world. Hell, even the images in your blog posts have led me to view art/media through an anthropological lens.
Thank you! I hope to give voice to those who have passed on, and whose ideas may become lost -- in no small part because of the current political climate.
I agree that Roman philosophy was inferior to Greek philosophy. This might be due to a qualitative difference in cognitive ability between the two populations. Or it might simply reflect the smaller size of the Roman population during Republican times, in relation to the size of the Greek population. There is also the possibility of differential survival of philosophical writings: Greek manuscripts were preserved by the Eastern Roman Empire until Renaissance times, while Latin manuscripts were less able to survive the collapse of the Western Empire.
Once again Peter, you have published a fascinating and lucid story of Roman populations cognitive abilities. It was a pleasure to read. One question I have is if far more ancient Roman DNA is discovered in the future; say thousands of samples, instead of 127 and 102 sample groups respectively, do you think the distributions of mean intelligence would change much across the different time periods? And I know I've mentioned this before but it would be great to see you present your ideas in a video interview in 2024!
I would like to see more data from Late Antiquity. When, exactly, did mean cognitive ability start to rise again? This is a point on which I disagree with many other people. I believe it was associated with the rise of Christianity as a State religion. Others think it was caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire. I would also like to see data from the rest of the Roman Empire. We have some preliminary data from Greece, and it shows a similar pattern.
Yes, I should do video interviews. I just worry about having to come up with a quick answer to an unforeseen question. I also worry about whether I'll come across as hesitant or unsure.