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Isotope analysis of 2000-year-old skeletons buried in Imperial Rome reveal some were migrants from the Alps or North Africa, according to a study published February 10, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kristina Killgrove from University of West Florida, USA, and Janet Montgomery from Durham University, UK. Previous work has focused on the overall human migration patterns within the Roman Empire. To understand human migration on a more granular level, the authors of this study examined 105 skeletons buried at two Roman cemeteries during the 1st through 3rd centuries AD. They analyzed the oxygen, strontium, and carbon isotope...

> Elba has been inhabited since the Iron Age. Ligurian tribes were followed by Etruscans and then Greeks. A rotating cast of residents, refugees and pirates made appearances in subsequent centuries including the Pax Romana, bands of North African raiders, the Spanish and Cosimo I de' Medici, who in the mid-16th Century founded and fortified the port town of Cosmopolis, today's Portoferraio. But none of these occupants did more in so little time as France’s all time greatest military mastermind and badboy, Napoleon Bonaparte. Though the Emperor escaped less than a year after being “banished” to Elba (the penal equivalent...