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"When you look at the DNA of the Longobard tribes,

June 9, 2019 by Kimberly Parks

"When you look at the DNA of the Longobard tribes, the only thing that comes to mind is the fact that there are many different variants. That's why there's so little evidence for them," says the paper's lead author, Christopher Sainz, of The University of Arizona in Tucson.

So far, the Longobards have been found in areas as far north as France.

"The Longobards have lived in the Balkans, Italy, and the Balkans, but the long-term significance of their genetic makeup is in their history," explains Sainz.

Sainz, who is also the director of the Center for European Research at the University of Amsterdam, was not involved in this study. "We have not even been able to establish whether any of these tribes were in the wild in Europe. However, it appears that they were, in fact, among the last to be found in European society, which is quite extraordinary given the long-standing suspicion that they were among the last to have settled on the Continent in the first place."

"We do know that there is an ancient presence of Longobards, but how, specifically, is this unique, geographically isolated presence of the Longobards different from that of the Paleolithic peoples (who were less than 1% of the total population of the continent) or the Neolithic peoples (who were about 3% of the population of the continent)? If so, the long-term significance of these long-term traits in the Longobards' history is very important, since there are so few signs of Paleolithic or Neolithic history in Europe. But that's not the only possible explanation," Sainz adds.

In any case, Sainz and his colleagues say that they will be working a much more thorough, more comprehensive study of the Longobards' past. "If we're able to establish whether these long-term traits are actually present in European populations, then we can see which of the long-term traits probably will explain the diversity of the Longobards in the modern world," says Sainz.

"A lot of what we're seeing in the results of this study is that the Longobards were among the last to settle on Europe," agrees Sainz. And there's an even bigger problem with that.

While the Longobards are the largest of the modern European tribes, they are the only one of their kind that had a large presence in the West, says Sainz.