Pompeii DNA evidence contradicts long-held assumptions about victims buried in ash

Centuries later, and it turns out that long-held assumptions about some of the people of Pompeii should not have been set in stone.

New DNA analysis of skeletal remains in the doomed Roman city has revealed that some of the victims of the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius. have been misidentified, underscoring how much modern thought has been projected into the ancient world.

“We show that the individuals’ gender and family relationships do not match traditional interpretations,” wrote the authors of the research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “Modern assumptions about gendered behavior may not be reliable lenses through which to view data from the past,” they added.

Pompeii’s victims were later immortalized by archaeologists who used plaster to fill the cavities left by their bodies, and observers have long created stories based on these casts, one of which was long believed to be a mother holding a child and two women who embraced when they died.

But the DNA analysis has shown that the person believed to be the mother was actually a man unrelated to the child, according to the new research.

And at least one of the people locked in the embrace — long thought to be sisters or a mother and daughter — was a man.

“The genetic results encourage reflection on the dangers of inventing stories about gender and family relationships in past societies based on today’s expectations,” said one of the study’s authors, Professor David Reich, in an interview Thursday with Harvard Medical School, where he gives a lecture.

Researchers from Italy’s University of Florence and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the German city of Leipzig also took part in the study, which examined 14 casts that were being restored in an attempt to determine the victims’ gender, ancestry and genetic relationships using preserved genetic material for nearly 2,000 years.

Their findings also revealed that residents of the seaside resort favored by wealthy Romans had diverse backgrounds, primarily tracing their ancestry to immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, highlighting the mobility of people and the multicultural nature of the Roman Empire.

Before the eruption, which lasted more than 24 hours and had the power of thousands of nuclear bombs, Vesuvius had been mostly dormant for centuries.

An estimated 20,000 people lived in Pompeii at the time, and many were consumed by a wave of ash, pumice and mud that froze them in place under a fresh layer of volcanic sediment.

Over the centuries, Pompeii and the dead were forgotten and remained buried for almost two millennia until a farmer found part of the city under a vineyard in 1748.

In the 19th century, archaeologists were pioneers technique of pouring plaster into cavities left by decomposed bodies, creating lifelike casts.

Since then, more than 100 of these casts have been produced, capturing the victims’ forms along with any surviving bones preserved over the centuries, according to the Pompeii Archaeological Park.

Research into Pompeii continues to reveal new details about the ancient city and its people, with new discoveries being made all the time.

Earlier this year, three researchers were awarded a $700,000 prize for using artificial intelligence to decipher a 2,000-year-old scroll charred in the eruption.

And last year, excavations revealed that people had died as a result of an earthquake as well as the eruption, and a lavish house was revealed two decades after restoration began.