The Goths migrated over vast distances in the late Roman period, plundering the towns and farmsteads of the declining Empire.
Gothic identity
A study of human remains from two cemeteries in Bulgaria, all buried with distinctively ‘Gothic’ jewellery, brooches, and belt buckles, suggests that the ancient Goths were ethnically diverse and not a single homogeneous community.
The findings were published as a pre-print paper on the bioRxiv server (https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.03.709317), so have not yet been peer-reviewed. The research is based on the analysis of ancient DNA from 38 individuals, and critics have said that this is too small and localised to draw broad conclusions about the Goths as a whole. Even so, the genomes sequenced by the team led by Svetoslav Stamov, of the Institute for Balkan Studies in Bulgaria, seemingly show just how varied was the ancestry of those whose burials indicated Gothic affiliation. Diverse biological ancestry was represented by the remains of people from northern Europe, the Caucasus, the Levant, Anatolia (modern Turkey), Egypt, East Asia (modern Mongolia), and sub-Saharan Africa.
