ARCHAEOLOGISTS have found the 2000-year-old skeleton of an Asian man in a cemetery in Italy, suggesting that the Roman Empire's reach was far more extensive than previously thought.

Although the Romans are known to have traded for silk and exotic spices with China, it was thought that most of the commerce was conducted through intermediaries along the Silk Route and that no Chinese or other Asians entered the empire itself.

That orthodoxy will now have to be re-examined after a Canadian team analysed bone DNA and found that the man came from East Asia, suggesting that Chinese or even Japanese rubbed shoulders with Gauls, Vandals, Visigoths and Nubians who made up the Roman Empire's polyglot population.

''This discovery poses many questions about globalisation and the movement of people in Roman times,'' said Tracy Prowse from McMaster University in Canada.