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A woman wearing an ornate golden bracelet holds a four-year-old child tenderly in her lap. The father and their son sit nearby. It’s the year 79, and the family is huddling under the staircase of their lavish three-story home in Pompeii, preparing for their last moments together.
On the second day of the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius, the so-called Home of the Golden Bracelet is buried, and the family parishes, the mother still holding her child in her arms.
At least that’s how the story has been told for the last 50 years.
Now, a new paper, published in the journal Current Biology, reveals DNA evidence that is rewriting this popular story and several others.
“Sometimes these more intuitive narratives aren’t always the correct ones,” says coauthor Alissa Mittnik, who took part in the research while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. “The stories behind these people might be way more complex.”
In 1974, the two adults and two children were found on the ground floor, hiding under the staircase of their home. Like many victims of the catastrophe, impressions of their remains were preserved as plaster casts. These eerie casts depict what position people were in in their last moments—whether attempting to flee, clutching possessions, or shielding a loved one. The casts were so detailed you can see the outline of one of the child’s eyelids—but despite the preserved physical details of those who died, much of their story remained unknown. Now, by analyzing ancient DNA extracted from small bone fragments preserved in 14 casts that are undergoing restoration, researchers have unearthed a wealth of new information about these people of the past.
For example, that wasn’t a family in the house, at least not in the traditional sense. Genetic analysis showed the four individuals were all male—and all unrelated. “This is not the nuclear family of mother, father, and two children,” says Mittnik, who is now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “Now, there are countless other possibilities of who they could have been.”
Two other casts long assumed to be of sisters, or mother and daughter, were also determined to include at least one genetic male. “This study illustrates how unreliable narratives based on limited evidence can be, often reflecting the worldview of the researchers at the time,” stated coauthor David Caramelli at Universita di Firenze in Italy, in a press release.
Researchers also looked into the Pompeiians’ ancestry, revealing a diverse community. Most descended from recent immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean. Roman archaeologist Steven Ellis at the University of Cincinnati, who was not involved in the study, sees this as one of the most important findings of the new work. “We can start to imagine a more cosmopolitan kind of city,” he says. While archaeological evidence has already suggested Pompeii was a diverse, worldly community—based on what we know about their food, names, and jewelry—these genetic findings add a new level of confidence. “It’s quite a novel way of getting to an old question,” he says.
The new research not only rewrites common misconceptions of the past—it provides a hint of what future analysis may reveal. Since the mid-18th century, two-thirds of Pompeii has been excavated. When excavations were halted in 1960, the secrets of the remaining third were left buried in ash. In 2017, necessary conservation efforts began on the city’s perimeter, allowing for limited excavation of new areas. The digs revealed a fast-food restaurant and two new skeletons, among other discoveries. “They’re exposing a little bit to protect a lot,” says Ellis, “and to provide longer-term protection for the city.”
While unearthing the past is exciting, many scholars advocate for leaving a significant area buried for future generations of scientists to explore. This new paper is evidence that there is always more to learn from the excavations and artifacts of the past—including the plaster casts. It also is a lesson in the great value new technologies can provide, if we’re willing to wait.
“What we’re finding is that we now have new questions, new approaches, and new technologies to do some new work and to find out some new information,” says Ellis. “But those new questions are always going to be continuing, so it’s good to have something for the future.”
While genetic work has been ongoing in Pompeii prior to this study, working with ancient human DNA is particularly tricky, says Mittnik. It is easily contaminated by the DNA of modern humans who come in contact with it, including excavators and archaeologists. Also, this fragile DNA—which is best preserved in cold, arid conditions—is easily degraded in the Mediterranean climate, and was already exposed to extreme heat from the eruption. All together, this creates a challenging task.
“We really had to wait until the methods were good enough to ensure that we can retrieve DNA that we can make sure is actually authentic, ancient DNA from these individuals,” says Mittnik. When it comes to deciding what to leave untouched in Pompeii, she adds, “I think it completely makes sense to keep our scientific descendants in mind.”