New DNA evidence rewrites long-told stories of people in ancient Pompeii

When a volcanic eruption destroyed the ancient city PompeiiCitizens’ last desperate moments took place protected has been in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories in plaster casts later made of their bodies, such as a mother holding her child and two women embracing as she dies.

But new DNA evidence It suggests that all is not as it seems, and these common interpretations stem from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to refute or challenge some of the previous narratives based on how these individuals were related to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It leads to different interpretations of who these people might be.”

Mittnik and his colleagues discovered that the person thought to be the mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people hugging each other, long assumed to be sisters or mother and daughter, was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The team, which also included scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two thousand years. After Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and destroyed the city of Rome, the bodies buried in mud and ash eventually decomposed and remained where they once were. Casts were created from cavities in the late 1800s.

Researchers focused on the 14 casts that had entered the restoration and extracted DNA from fragmented skeletal remains mixed with them. They hoped to determine gender, ancestry and genetic relationships among the victims.

There were many surprises in the “house of the golden bracelet” where the mother and child were allegedly located. The fact that the adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry that gave the house its name reinforced the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child, thought to be the remainder of their nuclear family.

Mittnik said DNA evidence showed that the four were male and unrelated to each other, making it clear that “the story that has been around these individuals for a long time” is false.

Researchers also confirmed that the citizens of Pompeii came from different origins but were mostly Eastern Mediterranean immigrants; this underlines the broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. Pompeii is approximately 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Rome.

The study builds on research from 2022, when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time, confirming the possibility of extracting ancient DNA from still-existing human remains.

“They have a better overview of what happened in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said study co-author Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, who was not involved in the current research. “We actually had one.” genome, one sample, one shot.”

Although there is much to learn, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a more accurate picture of how people lived in the distant past, Scorrano said.

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