Why did Rome, rather than any of its many rivals in Iron Age Italy, become the core of an empire?
A muddy settlement on the Tiber turns into a machine that can raise armies, write laws that outlive empires, build roads that stitch a continent together, and carry water for millions through aqueducts, while running a Mediterranean-wide bureaucracy for centuries. The usual explanations are familiar: institutions, military discipline, geography, luck. All true, and none of them feels fully satisfying on its own. Many societies possessed some of these advantages. Rome was unusual in how consistently it turned them into scalable institutions.
There is another angle that is rarely discussed, mostly because until recently it was not testable. What if part of Rome’s advantage was carried in its people, as average differences in traits linked to learning, planning, and administration?
Ancient DNA makes it possible to ask that question directly. Using the AADR dataset and educational attainment polygenic scores, Iron Age and Republican-era Romans come out unusually high. Besides exceeding earlier Italian groups, they sit at the top of the entire ancient European distribution, even after accounting for sample age and genomic coverage.
That by itself does not explain the rise of Rome. But it does suggest a sharper hypothesis: Rome’s institutions may have been built and operated by a population that, on average, was unusually well suited to master and scale complex social systems.
15 Replies to “What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Chicken or egg?
Rooster
It’s hard to run an empire when the average IQ is under 80.
Yes, the Phantom.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations
https://www.amazon.com/IQ-Wealth-Nations-Richard-Lynn/dp/027597510X
Related, lets not forget Classical Greece’s contribution to the amazing things that ancient Rome achieved, not least of which was their architecture.
Import the third world … become the third world.
Dumb-down the educational system … dumb-down your society
Label white culture racist … destroy white (Western) culture
Sadly, destruction is much easier than construction. And destruction is what the leftist, communist termites do. Yeah, “low DNA”, “low IQ” … are not barriers to becoming part of the destructive hordes.
I would suggest that the ‘lowest common denominator” humans … have been mostly responsible for the destruction of all contemporary societies.
Impossible!
All humans are identical in every way except for gender, which is infinite, and whiteness, which is incurable evil.
H8Ters!
All men are created equal … but the content of each man’s character … varies wildly.
God made Man.
Sam Colt made us equal.
All men are patently NOT created equal; but they must be treated equally by the state, under the law.
“Rome’s institutions may have been built and operated by a population that, on average, was unusually well suited to master and scale complex social systems.”
Well those people are long gone.
Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms was one of the few books I’ve read in my life that completely upended my thinking on this subject.
Imagine what our world would look like now if this genetic heritability/drift had occurred in a portion of the human population just after the beginning of the most recent intra-glacial period. We’d’ve probably spread out through parts of the Orion Spur by now, and terraformed Mars and mebbe Venus just for shits ‘n giggles while we were at it.
Fortunately Romans passed their knowledge down to the Britons…unfortunately they had to endure the trademark Roman beatdown before such a thing could occur.
No Rome…no Industrial Revolution…no industrial revolution, no British Empire and on it goes.
I miss James Burke.
Mister we could use a man like Marcus Aurelius again…
What did Romans ever do for Western culture and society?
Well, I’m guessing that they left a LOT of their DNA in the distant reaches of their empire, and that genetic influence helped to ensure those complex social systems survived.
Romania?