Parts of a skeleton found at Lant Street Museum of London Credit: The Independent

Two ancient skeletons unearthed at a cemetery in London may have been of Chinese origin, overturning longstanding assumptions about the history of the Roman Empire and Britain’s capital city.

Using cutting-edge techniques, a team of archaeologists and scientists examined dental enamel samples from over 20 sets of human remains dated from between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD.

Dr Rebecca Redfern, curator of human osteology at the Museum of London, revealed two of the skeletons found at the site in Lant Street, Southwark, had been identified as possibly being of Chinese origin.

“This is absolutely phenomenal. This is the first time in Roman Britain we’ve identified people with Asian ancestry and only the 3rd or 4th in the empire as a whole”, she told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One,

The find challenges the dominance of the traditional view that Roman Britain, and specifically “Londinium” as it was then known, was a relatively homogenous […]