Ancient DNA recovered from Pompeii changes long-held assumptions about the victims’ final moments

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Ancient DNA has revealed surprises about the identity of some people who perished in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii after a volcanic eruption, overturning misconceptions about their genetic relationships, ancestry and gender.

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the volcano spewed hot, deadly gases and ash into the air, slowly killing most of the city’s population. Ash and volcanic rock called pumice then covered Pompeii and its inhabitants, preserving scenes of the victims of the city’s destruction as an eerie time capsule.

Excavations first began to reveal the forgotten city in 1748, but it was not until 1863 that archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a method for making plaster casts of some of the Pompeii victims. The soft tissue of the bodies encased in ash had degraded over time, so Fiorelli poured liquid chalk into some of the outlines left by the corpses to preserve the shape of 104 people.

Tales formed based on the location of some of the remains, including those of an adult wearing a bracelet who was holding a child and believed to be the child’s mother. Similarly, a group of bodies found together were suspected to be sisters.

Now, during modern efforts to restore some of the casts, researchers retrieved bone fragments from within the cast and sequenced DNA from them, discovering that neither of these assumptions were true.

The findings, published Thursday in a new study in the journal Current Biologyincreases researchers’ understanding of the population demographics of Pompeii, as well as how bodies found together were connected to each other.

“The scientific data we provide does not always match common assumptions,” study co-author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said in a statement. “These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

Pompeii’s unique preservation of the tragic tableaus of its citizens’ final moments has given archaeologists a way to understand what life was like under the Roman Empire.

Located about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) southeast of Naples in what is now Italy’s Campania region, Pompeii was geographically ideal because of its port, according to the study. While the Greeks, Etruscans and Samnites tried to conquer it, Pompeii became a Roman colony, the study’s authors noted. But the eruption of Vesuvius wiped it and other nearby Roman settlements off the map.

The ash spewed by the volcano covered the bodies of people and animals and encased buildings, monuments, mosaics, frescoes, sculptures and other artifacts in Pompeii and other surrounding cities. Rainfall after the eruption caused the bodies to become cemented in the ash, and the hardened ash preserved the contours of whatever it covered, according to the study.

When excavations began at the Pompeii site centuries later, archaeologists uncovered nearly 1,000 outlines of people, both isolated and grouped together, in houses, squares, streets, gardens, and just outside the city walls.

In 2015, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii began restoring 86 of the 104 casts originally made by Fiorelli. X-rays and CT scans showed that although none of the casts contained complete skeletons, there were bone fragments in many of them. The scans also indicated that when archaeologists and restorers originally worked with the casts centuries ago, they manipulated them – enhancing and changing aspects of the body shapes, removing bones and inserting stabilizers such as metal rods.

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii invited the research team to examine the bone fragments and teeth that were available due to previous damage to the cast, said co-author David Caramelli, director of the department of biology and professor of anthropology at the University of Florence in Italy. The investigation team included the archaeological park’s former director, Massimo Osanna, current director Gabriel Zuchtriegel and park anthropologist Dr. Valeria Amoretti.

Together, park researchers and the study’s authors are working on a larger project to better understand the genetic diversity that was present in Pompeii during the Roman Empire.

“It’s a ‘genetic’ photo taken of a Roman city from 2000 years ago,” Caramelli said via email.

Some bones were mixed directly in with the plaster used in the casts and were incredibly fragile, but the team was able to extract and analyze DNA from several fragments.

The examined remains had been found at various sites preserved in the archaeological park, including the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of the Cryptoporticus and the Villa of the Mysteries.

The House of the Golden Bracelet, a terraced structure decorated with colorful frescoes, was named after an adult found wearing the object and with a child on his hip. Beside them was another adult, believed to be the child’s father. All three were found at the foot of a staircase leading out to a garden, while another child was discovered a few meters away, possibly separated from the rest as they tried to escape to the garden.

It is believed that the two adults and one of the children were killed when the stairs collapsed as they tried to escape, presumably to the nearby port.

Traditionally, researchers assumed that the person wearing the bracelet was the child’s mother. But the genetic analysis revealed the pair to be an unrelated adult man and child, Reich said. The adult male probably had black hair and dark skin.

The new study reveals a lot about our own cultural expectations, said Steven Tuck, professor of history and classics at Miami University in Ohio. Tuck was not involved in the new investigation.

“We expect a woman to be comforting and motherly, so much so that we assume a comforting figure is a woman and mother, which here is not the case,” Tuck said.

Learning more about the human remains in Pompeii can help others appreciate those who lost their lives in the disaster, said Caitie Barrett, an associate professor in the Department of Classics at Cornell University. Barrett was also not involved in the new investigation.

“Whatever their relationship was, this is someone who died trying to protect the child and who gave that child their last moments of human comfort,” she said.

House of Cryptoporticus was named after the home’s underground passageway with openings that ran along three sides of the property’s garden. The walls of the home were decorated with scenes inspired by Homer’s “Iliad”. While nine people were found in the front garden of the home, casts could only be made of four of them.

Two bodies appeared to be embracing, leading archaeologists to assume they were two sisters, a mother and daughter, or lovers.

The new analysis showed that one person was 14 to 19 years old at the time of death, while the other was a young adult. While gender assessment was not possible for one of them, the other was genetically classified as a male.

The Villa of the Mysteries takes its name from a series of frescoes dating back to the first century BC depicting a ritual dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility and religious ecstasy, according to the study’s authors. The villa included its own wine press, common for wealthy families at the time.

Several people were found in the house and it was clear that they died at different times of the eruption. The bodies of two adults, believed to be women, and a child were discovered falling on the lower floor of the home, while another six sets of remains ended up in overlying ash deposits in the same home, suggesting they survived the first wave of outbreak, only to die later.

One person was found alone in a room with a whip and five bronze coins and was wearing an iron ring engraved with a female figure. The man was thin and about 1.85 meters tall, and based on the traces of his clothing, he was probably the guardian of the villa who remained at his post until the end, the researchers said.

The genetic data collected during the research revealed that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan city full of people from diverse backgrounds, the study’s authors said.

Many are descended from recent immigrants to Pompeii from the eastern Mediterranean, reflecting broader patterns of mobility and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire, said study co-author Alissa Mittnik, group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an associate. in Reich’s laboratory at Harvard.

At the time, the Roman Empire stretched from Britain to North Africa and the Middle East, while Pompeii was next to one of the ancient world’s busiest ports, where ships regularly arrived from Alexandria in Egypt, Barrett said.

“What’s more, this part of southern Italy had an even longer history of international connections – the first Greek settlements in the Gulf of Naples date back more than 800 years before the eruption of (Mount) Vesuvius,” Barrett said via email. “So it makes sense that the background and appearance of the population would have reflected this cosmopolitan history.”

The study is a great reminder of the nature of the Roman definition of family, which included everyone in the household and not just immediate members, Tuck said.

“The ethnic composition of the deceased with so many markers from the eastern Mediterranean reminds us to be aware of the common Roman practice of slavery and regular manumission (release from slavery) of foreigners,” Tuck said. “We know it from Pompeii and can trace some of these people by their names in the city’s later years, but the stories told or assumed about these corpses assume a family of blood, not of slavery, marriage, manumission, adoption , and all the other ways families were created in the Roman world in Pompeii.”

Understanding the genetic diversity present in Pompeii is reshaping how scientists understand the city and its inhabitants, said Dr. Michael Anderson, Chair of the Department of Classics and Professor of Classical Archeology at San Francisco State University. Anderson was not involved in the new investigation.

“It helps to overturn the European ‘ownership’ of the so-called ‘classical world’ and shows the extent to which it is a misconception produced in the 18th and 19th centuries of our own time and which does not reflect the ancient reality.” Anderson wrote in an email. “Much of the modern interest in Pompeii has been driven by a desire to explore dramatic stories of death and destruction, to see ourselves reflected in the past, and is therefore a creation of a particular present, especially that of the time of original discovery. It’s great to see these old misconceptions finally unraveled and replaced with a much more diverse, interesting and scientific reality.”