The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is one of the best recorded disasters in human history. The ash and pumice that rained down preserved the marks of the dying where they fell, allowing us to guess the identities and relationships of the people frozen in time.
But we humans are imperfect. We navigate the world with perceptions and biases that cloud our observations, no matter how hard we try to remain objective. A new analysis of the DNA of Pompeii's victims reveals that our assumptions about them were wrong – a discovery that gives us insight into the vibrant life of Pompeii before a volcano extinguished it.
“The scientific data we provide does not always match common assumptions,” says geneticist David Reich of Harvard University.
“For example, a notable example is the discovery that an adult wearing a gold bracelet and holding a child, traditionally interpreted as a mother and child, was an unrelated adult man and child. Similarly, a pair of individuals thought to be sisters, or mother and daughter, were found to contain at least one genetic male. These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”
The volcanic material dumped on Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius exploded acted as a kind of flash fossil process. It fell on and around the dead and dying and was then put into place. As the bodies succumbed to time and decay, they left hollow impressions in the ashes.
The ruins were rediscovered in the 19th century; in the 1870s, plaster was poured into the cavities to make casts of the bodies from which they were formed. But the shapes of the bodies were not the only thing preserved. The bones left behind were also sealed in plaster.
The archaeologists who made the casts in the 19th century could not have anticipated the emergence of future technology; nevertheless, their work would prove invaluable more than 150 years later. That's because the casts give us context for details preserved in the genetic makeup of the victims, which in turn helps us understand life in Pompeii and Roman-era Italy.
The analysis, led by forensic archaeologist Elena Pilli of the University of Florence in Italy, was conducted on fragmentary skeletal remains from 14 plaster casts, selected from 86 casts currently under restoration. This is no easy task, anthropologist Alissa Mittnik of Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany told ScienceAlert.
“Both the extreme heat during the volcanic eruption and the plaster casting process can be detrimental to long-term DNA preservation. In genetic analyses, we typically try to target skeletal elements that are known to preserve DNA exceptionally well, such as the inner ear portion of the skull or teeth,” she explained.
“In this study we had to be less selective because we could only sample the parts of the skeletons that were exposed in damaged casts that were being restored. The difficulty of obtaining ancient DNA under these conditions is evident from the fact that only six of the fourteen sampled individuals provided us with genetic data.”
But those six individuals were enough to pose a significant challenge to what we thought we knew about Pompeii's victims.
The casts are excellent, but not perfect, and details can be difficult to gauge with the eye alone, so archaeologists relied on other clues. The flashy gold bracelet worn by the person hugging a child was thought to be women's jewelry. The tender affection with which each couple embraced was interpreted as feminine. It turned out that both assumptions were wrong.
In the House of the Golden Bracelet, four individuals were interpreted as parents and their two children not genetically related to each other. At least one person in the embracing couple was male – and probably the other was too.
The findings indicate a much deeper, more complex society than we imagined for Pompeii.
“I had come across the conventional stories surrounding some of these groups of victims before studying them scientifically and they seemed plausible to me. So I was quite surprised to see that the genetic results revealed that there is more to these people's stories then 'what meets expectations'. eye',” Mittnik told ScienceAlert.
“The findings make us reconsider simplistic interpretations of gender and family dynamics in Roman society, which may not reflect modern Western intuitions.”
The analyzes also revealed greater genetic diversity in Pompeii than suspected. The individuals studied were mainly descendants of relatively recent immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, and not of people who had lived in the local region for centuries.
This is similar to the diversity seen more broadly in the Roman region of western Italy, and reflects early attempts at globalization, made possible by strengthening trade throughout the Roman Empire.
And these are just six individuals in a city of thousands. It is an astonishing result. Not only does it give us a new glimpse into the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago, it is a sobering reminder to check our biases at the door if we want to conduct an accurate study of human history.
“While our findings allow us to question some of the traditional narratives, we must be careful not to repeat the same mistake,” Mittnik told ScienceAlert. “Instead, our results emphasize the importance of integrating different lines of evidence and of not overlapping modern assumptions on ancient contexts.”
The research was published in Current biology.
