New DNA analysis challenges tales of Pompeii victims’ final moments

A new DNA analysis of Pompeii victims has challenged the stories told about the final moments of the ancient city’s people.

What is Pompeii?

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD destroyed Pompeii, a thriving city located in present-day Italy, and left its people to die slowly from the gases and ash the volcano released into the air.

Ash and volcanic rock covering people’s bodies preserved their final moments.

In the 1880s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli made plaster casts of 104 of the Pompeii victims by pouring liquid chalk into the ashes of bodies once made of soft tissue that had since decomposed.

Scientists ‘disprove’ ancient stories with DNA

Researchers from Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Florence in Italy used genetic material preserved in some of the casts in hopes of determining the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships of the Pompeii victims.

In their study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the researchers examined the fragmented skeletal remains mixed in 14 casts.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built around how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told The Associated Press. “It opens up different interpretations of who these people could have been.”

What did the study find?

What was thought to be a mother holding a child was actually a man unrelated to the child, according to the investigation. And one of the two women locked in an embrace, thought to be two sisters or a mother and daughter, was actually a man, the study shows.

A residence in Pompeii known as the “House of the Golden Bracelet” was believed to contain a mother and child. The house was named after an intricate piece of jewelry that the adult wore, further giving the impression that the adult was a woman. The bodies of another adult and a child found nearby are believed to be the rest of their nuclear family.

However, the investigation found that the four victims in the house were men and not related to each other. This clearly showed that “the story that had long been spun around these individuals” was wrong, Mittnik said.

Meanwhile, the study confirmed that the inhabitants of Pompeii, which is over two hours’ drive from Rome, had diverse backgrounds but were mainly descended from immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean.

This article includes reporting from the Associated Press.