They Found 60 Soldiers in a Greek Mass Grave — DNA Says Most of Them Were Not Greek

In 480 BC, on the northern coast of Sicily, a trench near the Greek colony of Himera was filled with the bodies of men killed in battle: some with arrowheads still in the bone, some placed with care, others apparently dragged there. Twenty-five centuries later, scientists took a tooth from one of them and asked where he grew up. The answer was: not here. This video looks at who really fought in one of the most famous battles of the Greek world. You'll learn how strontium and oxygen in tooth enamel revealed that roughly two-thirds of about 60 soldiers buried after the 480 BC battle did not grow up near Himera, how a separate DNA study found that nine of 16 soldiers from that battle had ancestry from Central Europe, the Baltic, the Caucasus, and the steppe, and why the men with Greek ancestry were buried differently from the rest. Then we get honest about what the title can't say on its own: Himera is a Greek colony in Sicily, not in Greece; "most" applies to the first battle only, while the soldiers tested from the second, in 409 BC, looked local; the DNA covers about 20 soldiers, not 60; and "mercenary" is the researchers' best explanation, not a proven fact. #Himera #AncientGreece #AncientDNA #Archaeology #EmpireUnveiled