The field of science known as historical genetics now has a history of several decades. In fact, it is well known that the eugenicist movements started to link genetics with the science of history at the end of the 19th century, which a few decades later - in a much darker age, precisely as an early effect of eugenics - gave birth to the most terrible tragedies of the last century between 1933 and 1945. Historical genetics as we know it today - forgetting the traces of this dark past or sweeping it under the carpet - has achieved countless significant results since the 1980s, sometimes confirming the hypotheses of history and archeology based on written and unwritten sources, sometimes refuting them and taking them in a new direction directing the research. Historical genetics shakes spirits with new results almost every day and more than once calls historical science to self-examination: Ötzi, the iceman, although he died in Tyrol, may have been of Sardinian origin, the Etruscans and the Latins came to Italy from the steppes of today's Ukraine in the Bronze Age, the Hungarians already Even at the beginning of the Árpád era, it was considered a rather heterogeneous population, the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans can be found in Anatolia as early as the Neolithic , and the ten million euro ERC Syngergy Grant, which examines the historical genetic and archaeological connections of Central and Eastern Europe in the age of migrations (c. 400-900). With this in mind, it is perhaps understandable why the Romanian doctor and infectologist Mihai G. Netea's volume, entitled The (incomplete) genetic history of the Romanians (O istorie genetică incompletă a românilor, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2022 ), has become one of the most popular science popularization books of recent years. The volume sold thousands of copies and was very difficult to find in bookstores a few weeks after its publication. The volume's popularity may have been contributed by the fact that Mihai G. Netea gave several lectures on the topic in the last few years, which quickly spread in various social media networks. Although he has a medical degree, Netea has written a volume on the subject of history. He wanted to delve into the decades-old discipline of historical genetics, for the first time in Romania, in the form of an educational book, but this, as we shall see, is to be interpreted as a colossal failure. Going through the literature of Mihai G. Netea's volume, it is obvious that the vast majority are historical sources and not contemporary historical genetic studies. These mostly dominate in two chapters: the chapter describing the prehistoric age and the chapter dealing with the Hungarians. In the introduction to his volume, Netea tries to show the reader, with almost childlike naivety, that the contemporary concepts of "people", "nation", "national" are extremely complicated and consist of many components, using the example of stuffed cabbage. One of these is gastronomy, which also excellently shows in the case of the Romanians how many different influences have affected and shaped their gastronomy over the centuries - see the complicated Balkan-Turkish and Central European history of stuffed cabbage. However, in Netea's introductory chapter, it becomes clear that he does not have basic knowledge not only of history, but also of political science and sociology. The definition of the basic concepts – genetic population, people and national identity – would be essential in the case of such work. 
As archaeologist Bálint Csanád correctly stated: "to avoid dilettantish conclusions, let's state: geneticists' concept of population is not the same as historians' concept of people". A huge flaw in Netea's introductory chapter is the complete disregard for these concepts. In the absence of conceptual definitions and the complete disregard of the political historical phenomenon of the nation as a modern construct ("imagined communities", as defined by Benedict Anderson), Netea's volume practically does not even meet the most basic professional requirements. The following chapters of Netea try to present the different population genetic changes of the European Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, Copper, Iron Age, Roman Age, Age of Migrations, Middle Ages and Modern Age, following the chronological order of the history of Homo sapiens. There would be no problem with the structure if the author did not use such impossibility as "the Romanians 50,000 years ago". Netea's starting point is fundamentally correct: the genetic map of each individual carries a history of hundreds of thousands of years. Our cells contain the history of the "racial mixing" of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals (they really went through racial mixing at the beginning of prehistoric times), the genetic mutation of blue eyes and many diseases, the change in our skin color, the development of our diseases and disease tendencies. These are individual stories, which, however, are greatly influenced by the collective, Netea expands in the chapter dealing with prehistory - perhaps because a lot of general genetic studies on European populations and haplogroups were published for this age - and provides a lot of interesting medical details. This is his area of expertise: the effect of hundreds of thousands and millions of years of viruses and bacteria on human genetics. He's up to it, and you can feel it in the first few chapters. But when the volume reaches the end of the prehistoric age and the beginning of the historical age - from which a large number of archaeological and written sources are already known - the quality of the volume noticeably deteriorates. Since the genetic material of the groups living in today's Romania and the Carpathian Basin has only been researched in a few cases, Netea relies too much on historical sources when she always talks about prehistoric and ancient Romanians. His chapter on Dacians is the weakest. Being a culture that practiced cremation burials, the Dacians - which is a metahistorical concept in itself, commonly assumed several rival tribes already in antiquity, which were united by an elite for a shorter or longer period of time, although regionalities are also well documented (Gredistye–Székelyföld–Szilágy county) - historical genetic research would only be possible from a few special, exceptional burials. A Dacian burial with such a skeleton was found, for example, from the castle of Vajdahunyad, but the genetic analysis of the bones is still pending. Netea speaks of the Dacians as a single "people" (contradicting both the literary and archaeological sources) and the ancestors of the Romanians, despite the fact that only 4 of the 32 footnotes in this chapter cite historical genetic studies, and of those, only one study from 2019 is related to the Thracians. On page 105 of Netea's volume, he states that no genetic material is currently available for the Dacians. However, this does not prevent him from talking about Dacian-Roman synthesis in the next chapter. Netea is not doing anything else here, he is merely following the official historiographical line of the Romanian Academy - also from that the most conservative trend , which promotes Dacian-Roman continuity even after 1990. The chapter on the Roman period also mainly deals with the population genetics of the population of ancient Italy and the Etruscans (footnotes nr. 1-5, page 232.) during the Roman period, since there are no relevant Transylvanian-Dacian sources for this period either. The only study focusing on local genetic samples (Cocos et al. 2017) used contemporary genetic material and not samples from ancient Dacian or Roman (from Dacia) DNA.
Historical genetic studies on the population of Dacia province are sorely lacking, even though thousands of Roman graves have been excavated in the last century and a half. In the absence of these, it is difficult to talk about what proportion of the Romanian population today is "Roman". Perhaps it would have been worth quoting Balkan research from the Roman era, which precisely proves the high degree of genetic mixing and the subsequent Slavification. In a separate chapter, he deals with the period of migration, then with the Bulgarians, Hungarians and Kunks. Here, too, he basically relies on historical sources, since relevant genetic material and research was only done on the Hungarians, which he cites in detail, although he does not go into, for example, the genetic characteristics of the early medieval Transylvanian Hungarian and later Hungarian-Romanian population. Netea states that the conquering Bulgarians, Hungarians and Kuns merged very early with the contemporary population of the region (Avars, Slavs, post-Roman, Neo-Latin groups), the genetic effects on the Romanians were minimal at this age. This is certainly true, but we still do not know - and this is not clear from his book - who the Romanians are. Of course, the question is really meaningless from a genetic point of view, since "genetic Romanians" hardly exist. The title of the volume is also completely wrong, and it does not deliver what it promises: in order to map the genetic history of a population (in this case, the Romanian-speaking inhabitants of contemporary Romania, who identify themselves as Romanian), a sufficient amount of data would be needed. Did the author have this available? Unfortunately not. So writing about genetic history is fiction in this case as well. It is an even bigger problem that what Netea does in this volume is not a historical population genetics analysis, but rather a confused mixing of archaeological, historical, historiographical, ethnographic and linguistic traditions and sources with some contemporary results of historical genetics. The, Finally, Netea depicts the genetic history of Romanians in a pyramid (on page 215), which reveals (sic!) that Romanians genetically mostly (98 percent) have the genetics of Homo sapiens, 2 percent of which includes the genetics of Neanderthals and Denisovans (as most likely to all Europeans). They also have genetics from Stone Age agricultural groups (50 percent), prehistoric gatherers (30 percent), and Indo-European herders (or 20 percent). It is not clear where the author gets these data and ratios from, nor exactly with which haplogroup these tiny differences can be detected in the large genetic material of, for example, the Romanian population and other contemporary populations. In the third layer, it doesn't even give proportions anymore, it just marks the dice with upper and lower case letters, Romans (whatever this legal term means anyway), Slavs, Hungarians, Kuns and Roma. He barely mentions Greeks, Jews, Turks, Armenians, Tatars, Aromanians, Macedonians, modern-day Serbs, Bulgarians, Hungarian-Romanian, Székely-Romanian admixture (for example, the Csangós) and considers them marginal. Unfortunately, Mihai G. Netea's volume does not correspond to the methodology of the genetics of the story, nor to the vocabulary of archeology and historical sciences. It projects a modern image of the nation onto a population genetics for which there is basically no data from most historical periods. To my heart, I interpret Netea's volume as an example of the new metahistory resulting from the symbiosis of natural sciences and history, which I am afraid will open a new trend on the contemporary book market. However, all this apparently does not affect the popularity of the book, which continues to lead the sales lists of the Humanitas publishing house.
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