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

When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its inhabitants were preserved in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories such as a mother holding her child and two women embracing each other on the verge of death in plaster casts made of their bodies.

However, new DNA evidence suggests that things were not as they seemed. And these popular interpretations come from seeing the ancient world through modern eyes.

Alyssa Mitnik from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said: “We disprove some of the previous stories built on how these people were found related.” “I was able to raise my objections,” he said. “It opens up a lot of different interpretations of who these people were.”

Mitnik and his colleagues discovered that the person they thought was the child’s mother was actually a man with no relation to the child. And while they had long been thought to be sisters or mother and daughter, at least one of them was a man. Their study 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 that has been preserved for nearly 2,000 years. After Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and destroyed the Roman city, the bodies, buried in mud and ash, eventually decomposed and were left in their original locations. Castings were created from voids in the late 1800s.

The researchers focused on the 14 casts being restored and extracted DNA from the fragmented skeletons mixed in with them. They hoped to determine the victims’ gender, ancestry, and genetic relationships.

There were several surprises at the home of the mother and child, “The House of the Golden Bracelet.” The adults wore the elaborate ornaments that gave the house its name, reinforcing the impression that the victims were women. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child, believed to be the remaining members of a nuclear family.

Mitnik said DNA tests showed that the four men were unrelated and that the “stories that have been spinning around these individuals for a long time” were wrong, Mitnik said.

The researchers also confirm that Pompeii’s residents are of diverse backgrounds but primarily descended from immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, highlighting broader patterns of migration and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. are. Pompeii is approximately 150 miles (241 km) from Rome.

The study builds on a 2022 study in which scientists sequenced the genomes of Pompeii victims for the first time, confirming the possibility of recovering ancient DNA from extant human remains.

“Because they analyzed different samples, they were able to get a better picture of what was going on in Pompeii,” said the study’s co-authors, University of Rome University College T.L., who was not involved in the study.・Gabriele Scollano of Vergata School said: “There was actually one genome, one sample, one shot.”

Although much remains to be learned, such genetic strokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past, Scolano said. Ta.

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