POMPEII, Italy (KMID/KPEJ) – A family frozen in time by the volcanic eruption that struck Pompeii nearly two millennia ago. A mother, a father and two children… one of the many stories invented by observers of the plaster casts of the victims of the tragedy that struck the ancient city.
DNA evidence recently published in Current Biology suggests that things were not as they seem.
“What we found is that in fact all four of these individuals were male, disproving the theory that they were father, mother and two children. And besides, they were not in fact biologically related to each other,” says Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
There are also two people locked in a tender embrace, long believed to be sisters or mother and daughter.
“Again, we discovered that at least one of the individuals was male. And again, they had no motherly relationship with each other. So again, disproving the most common story that was told about them,” Mittnik said.
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The team, which includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material that has been preserved for almost 2,000 years.
After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the Roman city in 79 AD, the bodies buried in mud and ash eventually disintegrated, leaving spots where they once lay. At the end of the 19th century, casts were made from the cavities.
Researchers also confirmed that Pompeii’s citizens came from diverse backgrounds but were mainly descended from immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, underscoring a broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange across the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located about 150 miles from Rome.
The study builds on research from 2022, when scientists for the first time sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim and confirmed the possibility of recovering ancient DNA from the scant human remains that still exist.
“It’s super cool because all that genetic data is going to be published,” says Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that study who was not involved in the current study.
While there is still much to learn, Scorrano says, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a better picture of how people lived in the distant past.
“It’s super important to understand the genetic history and composition of this population in the past.”
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