When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeiithe final desperate moments of its citizens have been preserved in stone for centuries.
Observers see stories in plaster casts later made of their bodies, such as a mother holding a child and two women kissing as they die.
But new DNA evidence suggests things were not what they seem – and these prevailing interpretations come from an ancient worldview with a modern gaze.
“We were able to refute or challenge some of the previous accounts based on how these individuals were in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It opens up different interpretations about who these people could have been.”
Mittnik and his colleagues discovered that the person believed to be the mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people embracing – long thought to be sisters or mother and daughter – was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
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The team, which also includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two millennia. After the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of the Roman city in 79 AD, the bodies buried in mud and ash eventually decomposed, leaving spaces where they had been. Casts were created from the voids in the late 1800s.
The researchers focused on 14 casts being restored, extracting DNA from the fragmented skeletal remains mixed in with them. They hoped to determine the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships between the victims.
There were several surprises in “the house with the golden bracelet”, the home where the supposed mother and child were. The adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry, which gave the house its name, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and a child believed to be the remains of their nuclear family.
DNA evidence showed that all four men were male and unrelated to each other, clearly demonstrating that “the story that has long been told around these individuals” was false, Mittnik said.
Researchers have also confirmed that the citizens of Pompeii came from diverse backgrounds, but were primarily descended from immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, underscoring a broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located approximately 241 kilometers from Rome.
The study builds on research conducted in 2022, when scientists first sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim and confirmed the possibility of recovering ancient DNA from human remains that still exist.
“They have a better overview of what is happening in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of this research who was not involved in the current study. “We actually had one genome, one sample, one injection.”
Although there is still much to learn, Scorrano said, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past.
In August, Pompeii archaeologists announced they had unearthed the remains of two more victims: one a man and a woman discovered inside what was likely the bedroom of their home, where they had remained trapped as the rest of the structure filled with debris. The woman was found on the bed with a collection of gold, silver and bronze coins, as well as a pair of gold earrings, a pair of pearl earrings and others jewelry.
Earlier this year, three researchers won a Price of $700,000 for using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was burned during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The Herculaneum papyri include approximately 800 rolled up Greek rolls which were charred during the volcanic eruption of 79 CE that buried the ancient Roman city, according to the organizers of the “Vesuvius Challenge”.
The author of the parchment was “probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus”, who wrote “about music, food and how to enjoy the pleasures of life”, wrote the competition organizer. Nat Friedman on social networks.
The scrolls were found in a villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s patrician father-in-law, whose mostly unexcavated property housed a library that may have contained thousands of additional manuscripts.
