A number of people in Pompeii who died in the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 were not who experts thought they were, according to a team of researchers who recently collected DNA from human remains.
The team’s findings—published today on Current Biology-highlights previous incorrect conclusions about relations between the citizens of Pompeii and reveals new information about the demographics of the ancient Roman port city.
“We show that the great genetic diversity with the greatest impact in the Eastern Mediterranean was not just something that happened in the great city of Rome during the Emperor’s time, but also extended to the small city of Pompeii, which emphasizes the nature of Roman society with many races. ,” said Alissa Mittnik, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University, and co-author of the study, in an email to Gizmodo.
Pompeii was famous for being buried by hot dash and debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79. Vesuvius also destroyed the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, where experts found scrolls made of carbon that AI models could unwrap without damaging the documents. Beneath the ashes, Pompeii’s buildings, streets, and works of art—remnants of its daily life—were remarkably well preserved.
People were not so lucky. They die when they are hit by pyroclastic clouds—clouds of superheated gas, ash, and dust—although some of them may live for hours before succumbing to extreme conditions. Their corpses rotted long ago, except for their bones. But they left human-shaped voids in the hardened ash that early Pompeii investigators learned to fill with plaster, giving them a startling outline of the person who died there.
Researchers behind the new study extracted DNA from 14 of the 86 cements currently being processed. Despite the volcanic conditions that killed the Pompeian people, traces of their genes remain in the bones they left behind. The team discovered that some of the inhabitants were of a different gender than previously thought, and had different genetic relationships to each other.
A particularly famous collection of fossils visited by the group is of an adult holding a gold bracelet and a child—the child in the adult’s lap. Long interpreted as mother and child, the remains are actually of a male unrelated to the child. The other two—once thought to be sisters who died together—include at least one male. Their relationship remains unclear, but they were not two women closely related.
“This study shows how unreliable narratives based on limited evidence can be, often reflecting the worldview of researchers at the time,” said co-author David Caramelli, a researcher at the Universita di Firenze, in a Cell release.
“A lot of the stories that are told revolve around the victims thinking they might be trying to escape the city, but these stories tend to connect them to the place where they were found,” Mittnik said. “For example, the man found in the Villa of the Mysteries is shown as a villa keeper who stayed at his job accordingly.”
“Our research shows that such interpretations are often unreliable and instead we have to consider a variety of conditions that could explain the evidence we find,” he added.
Previous genetic studies of the ancient city’s inhabitants revealed how people migrated to Pompeii from other parts of the Mediterranean. One 2022 paper found evidence that at least one man who died there had Sardinian ancestry, in addition to the bacteria associated with spinal tuberculosis.
Demographically, the team found that the five people in Pompeii were not as closely related genetically to modern Italians and Imperial-period Etruscans as they were to groups in the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and North Africa—especially North African Jews. Pompeii was an important port for first-century Rome, so it’s no great surprise that it had representation from across the Mediterranean—but the genetics of the people surveyed confirms it.
“In my opinion, this discovery highlights the potential of ancient DNA analysis. When combined with bioarchaeological records, it can provide a subtle understanding of Pompeii’s victims,” said Gabriele Scorrano, a geneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and a contributing researcher to the 2022 paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Regarding the genetic makeup of the Pompeian population, the new information is in agreement with previous genomic studies, which show that there is an ancestry that was heavily influenced by recent migrations from the eastern Mediterranean.”
“Despite the challenges of preserving DNA from Pompeian remains, the authors have done an excellent job of retrieving genetic information, providing insight into certain aspects of Pompeian life,” said Scorrano.
This research also shows that genetic research of Pompeii people is an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. The team wrote that “it is possible that the exploitation of actors as vehicles for storytelling led to the use of their methods and related standardization by commentators in the past.”
In other words, previous research and restoration work at Pompeii may have distorted a basic truth about the place—where people were related when they died. Genetics do not lie, so they offer modern experts the opportunity to correct the narrative that may have been derived from previous attempts to simulate the last moments of Pompeii’s inhabitants in certain ways.
Pompeii is one of the most terrifying—yet amazing—examples of how tragedy can provide a portal into the past. New research methods make it possible to see more through that portal than ever before. As the genetic testing of Pompeii continues—and indeed, the excavation of many parts of the city that are still buried—we will get a more complete picture of the city swallowed by the volcano.