Shields Like Fish Scales, Part 1: The Mythical Lost Legion
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Check out USPS Ground Advantage service at USPS.com slash in the know. Because if you know, you know. Hey, everyone. Matt here with Joel from How to Money. Joel, I know you like a good road trip. What's the last one that you've taken? Okay, well, this was a flight, not a drive. But my wife and I just got back from the iHeart Podcast Awards in Austin, Texas. That was a lot of fun. And I knew it was going to be a hectic trip. So I booked a comfortable Airbnb for us that was very walkable to downtown. It was perfect.

Yeah, and nothing worse than spending half your trip stuck in traffic when you're trying to enjoy a new city, walking, even running around on foot. That is the way to do it, man. Agreed, yeah. And you know what hit me while I was there, Matt? How brilliant it is to list your own place on Airbnb when you're traveling, especially now that you can team up with a co-host who handles everything for you. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. In this episode, I'd like to take us back to the year 36 BCE. So at this point, we have two of the most powerful kingdoms of the day ruling over their respective spheres of influence.

So in the West, we have the Roman Republic on the cusp of collapse into the Roman Empire. And they're at the time in control of much of the Mediterranean coast, including all or significant portions of the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, Hispania, Gaul, Eryrichum, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Judea, Cyprus, Crete, and parts of coastal northern Africa.

And then in the east, we have the Chinese Han Dynasty, controlling an even larger territory that consisted of much of modern-day China with a significant expansion into western regions of this area.

So each empire was the most consequential of its day within its sphere of influence, though they were hardly mirror images of each other. The Roman Republic was in a very fragile state on the verge of collapse into the Roman Empire, and it's going to continue to experience threats to its stability from that point onward. While the Han Dynasty was some

somewhat consolidated and stable with a complex bureaucracy in place to solidify its emperor's rule. It's also worth stressing that the Han Dynasty also clearly had longevity on its side at this point, having existed from around 206 BCE. Interestingly enough, each was ruled to a certain extent by some form of unofficial triumvirate at the time. Rome by the first triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey.

And the Han Empire was sometimes administered by something like a triumvirate, most specifically in the form of the three excellencies who would run things if the emperor happened to be very young. But again, the Roman situation was an unsteady alliance of the day. And the Chinese version we're seeing here was more of a baked-in aspect of imperial rule. Mm-hmm.

At some point, I'd like to come back and explore the idea of rule by three in general is kind of like to what extent it works or doesn't work in human governance and so forth.

Now, why are we talking about the Romans and the Han Dynasty? Obviously, we're going to get to contemplations of and hypotheses, maybe even wild hypotheses, about how they might have come into contact with each other. And I have to acknowledge something that I remember playing as a kid. Maybe you played this when you were younger as well. I think it's still around in various forms. But the Age of Empires real-time strategy video games. Yeah.

Yeah, I remember that. I didn't play it much, but I remember it was popular among my friends when I was in middle school. And it did seem cool because you could make

historical empires or peoples that never would have really had reason to have much interaction with each other. You could make them clash. Yes. Yeah. And so it was, it was, you know, I haven't played in a long time, so I can't really do a deep analysis of it, but you know, at least on the surface, it was interesting that you were generating interest about these various times and places by putting them in a,

oftentimes unreal proximity to each other, like very unreal, like there's a river between the two of them, and then engaging in combat. And in my experience, it was like, well, what would happen if whichever empire I picked to command fell to, I don't know, the Aztecs, because I could never play these things correctly. I would just feel overwhelmed and would inevitably be destroyed.

But again, in these games, it makes it seem, and it's an artificial construct, it could make it seem as if, well, there's really not that much distance between these two empires in time or in space. But in this particular instance, talking about the Han Chinese and the Romans, the distance between the two empires, particularly for this day and age, was quite vast. Especially with other empires in between. Right.

That's right. Yeah. There were at least two major empires in between, as we'll mention here. So the Roman roads, the famous Roman roads, did not directly link Rome and China. There was trade along the Silk Road that, you know, unofficially, I guess, did sort of stitch the two together. There was definitely trade awareness.

and perhaps a distant military awareness, I've read. But each existed well outside of each other's sphere of influence. And in between them, as we're discussing here, you had various Central Asian kingdoms, nomadic groups. And of particular note to what we'll be discussing here, you had the Parthian Empire, which lasted from 247 BCE to 224 CE.

And this empire controlled modern-day Iran and much of Mesopotamia and was heavily invested in the Silk Road. This empire was preceded by the Seleucid Empire and ultimately succeeded by the Sasanian Empire, which we've talked about on the show before. Mm-hmm.

You can look up various maps of what these territories looked like. I found one from a bit later for our notes here, Joe, and I encourage folks to look up one. I think the one we're looking at here is from 100 CE, so not 100% accurate to what we're talking about, but it gives sort of a basic shape, and you get to see a sizable amount of territory between these two empires.

Just to be clear for the folks at home, you're talking about a map representing 100 CE, not from the year. Right, correct. This is a modern map.

that has been augmented to represent the rough boundary zones of these different kingdoms and empires. Right, because the interesting thing being, at the time, probably no one person could have combined a map with all the geographical knowledge to represent the land masses between Portugal to Korea, as we have here. Yeah, and distant kingdoms, distant empires, were truly distant, and there might just not be much known about them at all.

And more would, of course, be known about your immediate neighbors, neighbors that you probably had to deal with in terms of trade, in terms of various military conflicts. So on the Roman side of things, the Parthian Empire was a far greater immediate concern. And even beyond then, you had the Kushan Empire.

And for the Chinese, it was, you know, essentially the reverse, though their relationships were more, with the more immediate Kushan, were more cooperative. Apparently, conflict with various nomadic groups were more of a common threat for these two. And so contact between the Roman and Han empires basically remained a distant one, handled through intermediaries among the Parthians and the Kushans, as well as generally through the Silk Road.

But their knowledge of each other, again, was incomplete, even as their respective interests continued to creep out closer and closer to each other. And this is one of the, I think, the fascinating things about this historical scenario is it's so different from the interconnected world that we know today.

where, you know, there are places that are still very distant to us for various reasons, and it may not even be purely geographical distance. It could be informational distance and cultural distance and so forth, and various other factors could be involved. But, like, this was a time where something like two kingdoms away, it almost didn't exist. It almost took on maybe an almost kind of mythical energy.

Now, that's not to say there were not at least some recorded attempts at direct contact. One of them is mentioned in the book China History by British historian John Key, which

Though it occurred, this occurs sometime after the period we're looking at. This would be 97 CE. And this is when the Chinese sent a mission to Taqin, a distant realm with an apparently insatiable appetite for Chinese silk, according to Key. And he points out that this was likely Rome or at least its easternmost provinces.

But the mission ends up being detained in Parthia, likely by parties with a vested interest in preventing any direct trade between Rome and the Han dynasty because there's simply too much money to be made as the middleman in trade between these two.

Right. If you are currently making money as the station house in the middle of the exchange, you don't want to connect the parties on either side of you directly. Right. So that seems to be at least one of the stumbling blocks that occurred whenever direct communication was really attempted.

It's possible that there's something else in the history books that I didn't come across in which there was an attempted connection. But as far as I know, like not much ever really came together. But if we look to the world of, you know, highly hypothetical interpretations of ambiguous literary data.

it's possible we could maybe find something, right? And that's what we're going to be talking about a little bit here today. First of all, let's look to 53 BCE. So I mentioned the Roman triumvirate, of which Roman general and statesman Crassus was a member. He assumed Syria as his Roman province, but he apparently wanted more. Perhaps in particular, he wished to rival the military successes of Caesar and Pompey. So

So he launched a military campaign against the Parthian Empire that suffered from refusal to cooperate with allies, as well as a deliberate misinformation campaign against his incursion.

As a result, his forces were outmatched at the Battle of Kari. This would be modern-day Heron in what is now Turkey, and they suffered a disastrous defeat. Crassus himself lost his life. Later tellings of this would claim that the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat. I think we mentioned this in a previous episode, but this was likely a later Roman fiction, I think most historians contend.

But absolutely true that the Romans did not do well there. I think some of the troops escaped, but the majority of them were either killed or taken prisoner. Right. So that's 53 BCE. Fast forwarding now to 36 BCE. This is where we're getting to our outside hypothesis here. This is where we get into this mysterious affair of shields like fish scales.

So looking here at a 1941 paper titled An Ancient Military Contact Between Romans and Chinese by Homer H. Dubs, this paper lays out the scenario. So looking at Chinese histories of the time period, we have the situation where Romans

Allegedly, the protector general of the Chinese western frontier regions in Chinese Turkestan named Qin Tang ventures into Sogdia or Sogdiana to put down a Hun warlord whose whose name is difficult to pronounce, to be to be clear. We think it's I was reading something. It sounded maybe it's like Jujur.

And I think you were finding it maybe more like with more of a C sound, but maybe it's somewhere between a J and a C that our lips can't quite form.

Yeah. In his paper, Dubs spells his name C-H-I-H, C-H-I-H, like Chi-Chi. But I've seen the name spelled elsewhere in the scientific paper that I'm going to talk about later, which is going to disagree with this hypothesis being put forward by Dubs. They anglicize his name J-Z-H, J-Z-H.

So I think it is Chi Chi or something like that. Yeah. Either way you pronounce it, he was he was definitely a rising figure in this sort of region where different powers met.

He'd previously killed a Chinese envoy, and he was then invited by the king of Sogdia to come and help deal with some nomadic threats that they were facing. But he also was just seemingly amassing power, demanding tributes from tribes under Chinese protection, and generally just becoming an increasing threat to Chinese interests in the region. He was trying to set up his own thing. Yeah. And so the protector general here gathers his troops along with some auxiliary forces, and he sets out to attack this new city that this warlord has set up.

And it's here we learn from these various accounts sent back to the Han emperor that they encountered something perhaps strange. They saw strange soldiers fighting on behalf of the Han warlord. It would have been basically would have amounted to like more than 100 foot soldiers lined up in either side of the city gate in some sort of fish scale formation.

They apparently included illustrations, and I hope I'm inferring this correctly, but I don't think the illustrations themselves survived. I think what survived are histories written later based in part on these illustrations that were sent back.

Yes, it is a weirdly indirect method of information we're getting here. But Dubs does explain in his paper here that the information about what this military formation looks like comes from a Chinese text called The History of the Former Han Dynasty that itself says it got its information from

about this from paintings of the battle that were sent, uh, that were sent back to the Imperial court. And so somebody who saw the battle allegedly painted what it looked like. And then it is described, uh, in this history, the paintings are described as having, uh, more than a hundred foot soldiers quote lined up on either side of the gate in a fish scale formation. Uh,

So that is the particular visual detail in the description of the painting of the battle that Dubs is trying to explain here with the fish scale formation of the soldiers. What does that mean? It is taken to refer to shields, which I guess is our broader point here. That's right. That's right. Dubs contends that what they're talking about with fish scale formation is the

a shield wall, and not just any shield wall, he argues, but that of a Roman shield wall, the formation known as the testudo or tortoise that Romans would utilize. And his argument is that these were surviving Roman soldiers from the Battle of Cari who were now long since employed as foreign mercenaries.

Now, this probably is a good place to flag. We've already alluded to this, but a good place to flag again that Dubs' proposal here is highly speculative and relies on a bunch of assumptions that are...

not strongly in evidence. Um, it's an interesting idea, but it's, uh, far from certain or certainly not as certain as dubs will claim it is by the end of his paper. That's right. Um, and, and also, you know, not to say that, uh, it isn't worth talking about, but this is one of those ideas where this has come up on the show before, where it's like a proposal of something that's really, uh,

uh, radically interesting and unique and might gain a kind of, uh, epistemic advantage from that. Like it's, oh, it's so cool. The idea that, uh, that the ancient Chinese and the ancient Romans happened to may have happened to meet each other in battle at

one point. And we've got a theory explaining how that could have happened. That would be such an interesting idea. The mind kind of wants it to be true and thus views any claim of evidence on behalf of it, maybe unfairly favorably. So just to keep that in mind as we continue discussing, it certainly is worth talking through this idea. But it's one of the many examples of don't let the cool idea overwhelm your epistemic.

That's right. If true, it's amazing. But don't abbreviate that to just it's amazing. It's amazing and probably true. No, no. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Aero.

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Now, in the second episode we do, we're going to come back and discuss shield walls and particularly the testudo in greater detail. But just a reminder here, if you're not picturing what we're talking about, this was a shield wall formation that the Romans used that generally featured both a front and a top of overlapping protective shields in a layer, something that does look like scales, right?

And this would—and sometimes the sides—well, sides, sometimes all sides, depending on the description, would be covered as well. It made use of the Roman scutum shield, which was these big kind of like semi-cylindrical but otherwise kind of rectangular shields that the Roman soldiers had.

And it's also worth stressing that this was not the default Roman shield formation, but this is one that they could use in cases where they're having to endure sustained heavy projectile fire, such as while approaching walls during a siege, that sort of thing. Yeah, that's right. So imagine, yeah, you're trying to like maneuver around at the bottom of the wall of your enemy's fortifications. It makes sense to form this tight interlocked shield formation above your heads because they're going to be throwing stuff down at you. Right.

But does it make sense to use it all the time? No. We'll get into some of the reasons why in the next episode. But it is certainly iconic of the Romans. The Romans did use it. You see it pop up in Roman depictions of their own troops.

Dubs, his contention here is that while other forces use shield wall formations, only the Romans use shields big enough to generate an effect that could be described as looking like fish scales. And he also contended that, quote, "...the only professional soldiers of the time of whom regular formations are recorded were Greeks and Romans."

And then he makes the argument that Greek shields were round, and he argues too small to create this sort of shield formation. So it absolutely had to be the Romans. And therefore, what we have here is direct military conflict between Roman troops, granted no longer serving the Roman Empire or Republic, and soldiers of the Han Dynasty.

Now, based on just everything we've talked about so far, this is a really interesting suggestion. So the facts we're combining are the ancient Chinese historical account based on paintings of the battle, which again, I think we don't have the paintings, but we have the description of the formation of soldiers with these shields interlocked like fish scales.

And the fact that that would pretty well describe certain types of shield maneuvers that were done by the ancient Romans and that their shields in particular would have been good at creating the effect you described. And also the fact that we know from the first century BCE that.

A large contingent of Romans were captured by the Parthian Empire after this battle in southeastern Turkey, and it says that they were sent east. And that's all we know about them after that.

So on one hand, just recognizing all these little kind of unexplained details, otherwise just hanging out there in history is maybe something you wouldn't even really take notice of as notable or in need of explanation otherwise. And seeing how, oh, they kind of could fit together, especially, you know, they're in the right kind of timeline to fit together. That's kind of interesting. That is a kind of ingenious observation. On the other hand, it's the sort of thing where like...

as we were just saying, like, it's so kind of ingenious that you just want to fall in love with it and forget how many assumptions you're taking on early on. Like this is based on this very loose description of a battle.

Third hand from a painting. And also we don't actually know that Romans were employed by this nomadic ruler, uh, that they ever made it to that particular place. All that we know is they were captured after a battle hundreds of miles away. And it said the last we're told of them in Roman and Greek histories is that they were captured and they were sent somewhere East.

So big, big leaps being made, but it is a charming idea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's, it's possible, but, uh, but, uh, do we actually have the, the, the evidence for it? And yeah, that's, that's where we, we often come up empty here.

Additionally, Dubs hypothesized that the captured soldiers would then move further east and settled along the border of the Han Empire itself. And they were settled in this area where, of course, the troops end up intermarrying with the local population. This area comes to be known as Lichen, which essentially means legion, Dubs argues. And he argues that we can still see evidence of this lineage here today.

in the genetics of the local population here. Yes. And so this is sort of the secondary growth of this hypothesis about the idea of Roman soldiers in this battle, which again, we're not sure of that. Just it's an interesting idea. It's hard to prove that.

So there's that idea. And then there's the second idea that the Roman mercenaries form the ancestors of the Lichen people. And the Lichen are a real people that exist today. Many of them live in a place called Yongchang, which is a county in China in Gansu province.

And so they are real people. And this has been sort of connected to individual observations of, uh, morphological traits among some of the Lichian people that are said to look European. Like sometimes there will be a Lichian person who has, uh, who has like green eyes or blonde hair or something. And this has been connected to this idea that,

And in many ways, I believe, has been capitalized on for sort of tourism interest. Yeah. Yeah. There are some interesting articles talking about the degree to which the locals have revved up interest in this concept and maybe erected some statues and some buildings and put on some costumes appealing to tourists who want to come and see this place where a lost legion came to rest.

And maybe this idea of, oh, there's an intermingling here of Chinese and ancient Roman cultures and blood. And it seems to have been a very popular idea, not only in the West, but also in China. And this sort of seemed to really pick up steam in the 90s. And I would assume maybe reached its peak in 2015, right?

That's when we saw the release of a very expensive looking movie titled, well, this is at least its English release title, Dragon Blade.

starring none other than Jackie Chan, and then co-starring John Cusack and Adrian Brody. Whoa. Yeah, both Western actors playing Romans, with Cusack playing the good guy Roman and Adrian Brody playing the bad guy Roman. If nothing else, look up a picture of Adrian Brody's hair in this motion picture. It is amazing. Oh, it's like, this is,

Big, beautiful brunette bouffant just like puffed out. I guess this has got to be a wig. It can't be his real hair. I assume it's just too big. It's too glorious. I mean, he looks like he looks like an anime character come to life here. Oh, amazing. Yeah. Adrian Brody with big, big hair. I've never. Wow.

So that's funny. But also it's funny. John Cusack just seems like weird casting for a Roman mercenary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, by yeah. Yeah. By my number of standards, I think you can make a make a fair argument that that's the case. I don't know if he would have been my casting choice, but yeah.

But, you know, I don't know that this movie, which I haven't seen, so I can't really vouch for the quality here. I just looked at the stills. I looked at the trailer. This isn't like a period of Chinese cinema that I've seen much of. But, you know, it does show you just how exciting this concept is that you're like, let's make a movie out of that. Let's let's get let's get some big names from from around the world. Let's make a big international venture out of it to some extent.

Oh, I'm having a brainstorm. Okay. Combining our sort of like weird house cinema, unlikely castings, uh, recent discussions regarding virtuosity and the Roman theme. What if the two actors here had been.

Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington. That would have been great. We're bringing both from the two Gladiator movies. All right. They've already got the Roman bona fides. And here they are in in northwestern China, strutting to staying alive. Yeah. And either one could play the villain like they we have clear evidence that either one of them could pull it off. But back to this, the underlying hypothesis here. So, yeah, we want to be clear. There are a lot of problems with it before you even get into any discussion of genetics.

The big one, of course, is lack of evidence. Dubs himself, you know, bases this hypothesis on extremely little literary evidence. You know, if you were thinking game of telephone when we were talking about the evidence, I think that's fair. I mean, to a certain extent, all history is a game of telephone, but this especially sounds like one. Yeah, I would agree with that. Again, yeah.

Dubs' paper is an interesting read for a speculative history paper written in the 1940s. It's actually interesting for multiple reasons. Number one, it is cool to kind of follow the way he puts together these different pieces of evidence and all that. But it's also...

uh, a lesson in how the mind works in a way, because Rob, you and I were talking about this off mic, like noticing if you just go along the paper, it's kind of funny how he just like step-by-step leverages multiple. It is reasonable to assumes into, it is certain that these are the legionaries of Crassus. Yeah. Yeah. He, he, at least the way it's written, it sounds like he's just very convinced of this idea by the end of it.

And as it turns out, like other folks of his time and shortly thereafter, most of them disagreed with it, at least to some degree. I was looking at a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Asian History by historian Christopher A. Matthews, an historian here who ultimately presents his own hypothesis that, well, maybe the soldiers could have been Greek. And basically he just presents this as a, quote, more probable hypothesis.

getting into like details of the shield observations and so forth. But in it, he also provides a good overview of how other sinologists and historians of Dubs' own time reacted to the paper. And basically, there were some who accepted that this passage indicates foreign troops. Okay, fair enough. But disputed the idea that they were Romans. Others accepted only parts of the theory. Some of them also did that kind of thing where you

which you see in histories where a controversial hypothesis will be just mentioned without judgment to just say, well, Homer Dubs says such and such, and then they move on to the next.

or include it as a footnote, that sort of thing. Often happens if it's like ancillary to the main point you're making. It's like, I don't have time to argue for or against this. I just need to acknowledge that I know somebody said it. Right, right. And then others just dismissed it completely, saying that this is fiction or it's just not probable at all. Now, another thing, we talked earlier about the vast distances involved here. And even couching all of this

in the vast distances between those two empires, it's still tempting to sort of oversimplify the vast amount of space we're talking about. So the distance between Tehran, Turkey, and Yongcheng, China is 5,436 kilometers, or roughly 3,377 miles. And Joe included a map for you. Other folks, you can get a map showing this distance by just doing a Google search. But we're talking about a huge expanse of territory here.

Yeah. Dubs gets them part of the way there by accepting the history, saying that, OK, they're captured by the Parthians. And then we're told in histories that they were sent east from here to I think it says that they were sent to the region of Margiana, which is a region in Central Asia, overlapping parts of modern day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

And after that, of course, there are no more Roman or Greek records of what happens to these soldiers, what happens to the prisoners. It just says they were taken out to Margiana. So Dubs gets them from the battlefield to way at the other side of the Parthian Empire over there. That gets them part of the way that still doesn't get them all the way to where this ancient battle described in the Chinese histories would have been. And then that does not get them all the way to Yongcheng County.

Right. So there are there's a bunch of steps along the way that you would you just have to fill in and say, assume this happened. Yeah. And it's not to say these are impossible distances. And that's not and you have to acknowledge there are other accounts of people.

of people traveling great distance and ancient times, you know, on up through medieval times and so forth. And, you know, some of these are also have an air of myth making and legend about them. But, you know, it's not impossible. But still, the greater the distance, there's less likelihood and there are more problems than getting them from point A to point B. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Aero.

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Right. So, Rob, you asked me to look into this and I went digging around. The best study I could find of the genetic evidence concerning specifically the question of the Roman mercenary theory of the genetic origins of the Lichian people. The best study I could find on that was a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Human Genetics by Zhou et al. called

called Testing the Hypothesis of an Ancient Roman Soldier Origin of the Lichian People in Northwest China, a Y-Chromosome Perspective. And this paper has a bunch of authors, a majority of which are affiliated with Lanzhou University in China. It also has one author from the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Genetics in Beijing.

And the authors start off this paper by addressing the hypothesis we've been talking about. So they sort of lay out what Dubbs claims in his classic paper and how that idea has been developed historically since then. The main thing they're looking at is the claim that the Lichian people of Yangcheng County in Gansu Province, northern China, are descended from a group of Roman mercenaries that settled in the region in the first century BCE.

The story that we've been talking about of the, uh, the Roman mercenaries that went East is often told to explain the fact that some people, not most, but some in the area of Yongcheng County in, in Gansu province have what appear to be European looking physical features such as blonde hair or maybe blue or green eyes. Um, but the authors note that apart from any direct contradictory physical evidence, um,

This hypothesis of the Roman legionary origin of the Lycian people has been challenged by a number of scholars for a variety of reasons. One is a lack of strong archaeological evidence to support it. It would be one thing if you had a bunch of ancient Roman artifacts there. I mean, that would be kind of interesting, but that's not the case. The best thing I could find in terms of archaeological evidence were just sort of indirect inferences. And then also the fact that this

The hypothesis rests on a lot of speculative assumptions. So the authors here set out to investigate by comparing the genetic evidence. They write, quote,

Therefore, Y-chromosome polymorphisms in our study were used to investigate the paternal genetic landscape of the Liqians and to provide genetic evidence for a suggested origin of the Liqian people.

So in this study, the authors took blood samples of 227 unrelated men from four different ethnic populations of northwest China. The study featured 39 Tibetans, 49 Uyghurs, 87 Lichyans, and 52 Uyghurs, who are apparently closely related to the Lichyan people. They also compared the information collected from this analysis to Y-chromosome patterns in other populations around the world.

What did they find? Well, they found that 71.3% of the Y chromosomes from the Lychian people belonged to a haplogroup called O3M122, which is a specific East Asian lineage.

The Lichian people actually had the greatest frequency of this haplogroup of any of the four groups tested from northwestern China. So ultimately, the Lichian people were genetically closely related to other Chinese populations, particularly the Han Chinese people, but also to Mongolians and the Uyghurs.

Also, the authors say that genetically the Lycian people were found to be quite distinct from Central Asian and West Eurasian populations, which they say is incompatible with the hypothesis that Roman soldiers made up the bulk of their paternal ancestry.

So that doesn't necessarily rule out the idea that somebody from Europe or from the Roman Empire could have come to this region long ago, but it really doesn't fit at all with the idea that these people as an ethnic group or as a culture were descended from a settlement of Roman mercenaries.

The authors also get ahead of another thing that does pop up. Later on, they say,

I've read in various news articles, people will keep trying to resurrect this hypothesis, particularly by saying,

But look at these individual cases of local people in Yongchang with European looking features or look at maybe these individuals, a handful of individuals that have done genetic testing and maybe they show more Central Asian or West Eurasian ancestry. Could they be descended from Roman soldiers, even if the Lichian people in general are not?

It's hard to ever like completely rule out that sort of possibility. But the authors of this paper also point out that a captured legion of Roman soldiers turned roaming mercenaries turned settlers in Northern China is not the only way to explain some people in Yongchang having what look like European features or even some, some European genetic lineage, but

All throughout history, people were moving around in ways that were not documented in exciting narrative histories and mentioned in royal decrees about battles and things like that. The authors write, quote, "...along the ancient Silk Road in North China, it is common to see people with Caucasian morphological traits, which is also a classical trait of Chinese minority ethnic groups in Xinjiang, like the Uyghurs."

Therefore, we cannot trace a Li Qian origin only from morphological traits. And this area was indeed around the path of the ancient Silk Road. So that's another thing here that

somewhat undermine some of the claims people make for this roman legionary hypothesis um you know that's not the only way people from further west could have ended up in this region hundreds or thousands of years ago it's just one of the more exciting stories of how it could happen as a like the lost legion just is more appealing as opposed to like the lost silk merchants brethren

law. Not as exciting, but could easily be a factor in anything like this. Yeah, there was trade, there was some travel, economic transactions, and along the way there was some genetic exchange.

Yeah. Though I think that the lost Silk Merchant's brother-in-law would also make for a nice movie. So, and you could probably, it would probably be cheaper. Yeah. Let me actually back that up and say a counter narrative to the way people might be thinking about this is like, oh, I want the, I want the legionaries settling in China thing to be real. Isn't it actually more interesting to think about a

sort of non-military examples of cultural ad mixing in the ancient world. And where people are traveling and, uh, you know, not as like a, like an armed band who train and travel together and, you know, they're fighting through the, instead it's like smaller groups of people, maybe even individual people just trying to survive and get by in an unfamiliar culture in the ancient world without even having the kind of

the technology linkages and stuff that we have today that make transportation and communication across distance easy. Just trying to imagine that sort of thing in the ancient world is, is, is fascinating. You know, imagining just one lost trader or a small group of traders from one edge of the Eurasian continent getting, ending up in the other and settling down there. Like what leads to that? What, what is, what is the life of those people like?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's that kind of story that on one level it's, it's, it's more relatable because it deals with like everyday life and everyday experiences, uh, uh, though, you know, in a, in a setting that is, uh, that is also fantastic and intriguing, uh, you know, outside of like the military setting, which in ways is like easier to imagine because we've in part, because we've seen it depicted so much. Um, but I think also a reality that

is a little further from many of our experiences, you know, especially if we've never actually been in a military of one form or another, and certainly not in an ancient military. On the other hand, it is also interesting to think about ancient military tactics being sort of like lifted up and transplanted around to places where they were not familiar, where that was not normally what the armies did. And so thinking about a testudo formation with this wall of shields,

appearing in a place where that was not what the other armies were used to seeing it. That's interesting as well. And I think that's good fodder for continuing our look at shields and shield walls. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the Age of Empires thought experiment, right? And it's also a thought experiment that is not without context, right?

in the real world. We certainly do have situations, certainly with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, where you have combatants going up against combatants that they have never encountered before. And in some cases, weapons they have never encountered before. So, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment from multiple points of view. One more thing I want to bring up, though, is that if you look up articles about what we've been discussing here, you will find...

uh, locals from Yongcheng County, uh, dressed up in sort of mock, uh, Roman, uh, military attire. Uh, these are quite amusing images. And again, you know, they're, you know, get,

Get those tourism dollars. I understand. Like, totally makes sense. I understand the economic incentive here. But I have to say, shields are all wrong. You could easily say, well, this hypothesis cannot be correct because the shields in the illustrations are round.

They're not slightly cylindrical and rectangular at all. That's such a good point. I didn't even notice that the rectangular profile of the shields is like the core of what he bases the hypothesis on. Yeah. Yeah. And then here we got the round ones. But the tourists seem to be eating it up in these photos. Yeah. More power to them.

All right. Well, we'll go ahead and cap this one here. But yes, we'll be back in the next episode. This will probably be just a two-parter. But in the next episode, we'll get more into a discussion of shields, shield walls, and shield tactics. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.

If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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