A handful of people in Pompeii killed by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 are not who experts thought they were, according to a team of researchers who recently collected DNA from the individuals’ remains.
Team Results—is published today in Current Biology—Lightlight previously erroneous conclusions about relations between the inhabitants of Pompeii and reveals new insights into the demography of the ancient Roman port city.
“We show that the great genetic diversity with significant influences from the Eastern Mediterranean was not only a phenomenon in the metropolis of Rome during the Imperial period, but extends to the much smaller city of Pompeii, underscoring the cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic nature of Roman society,” 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 famously buried by hot streaks and debris when Vesuvius erupted in 79. Vesuvius also destroyed the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, where experts found carbonized scrolls that AI models can now be unpacked without damaging the texts. Under the feet of the ashes, Pompeii’s buildings, streets and works of art—remnants of their daily life– were remarkably well preserved.
The people were not so lucky. They died while bombarded by pyroclastic flows – fast-moving clouds of superheated gas, ash and dust – but some of them may have lived for hours before finally succumbing to the extreme conditions. Their remains decayed long ago, except for their skeletons. But they left behind human-shaped voids in the hardened ash that the early investigators of Pompeii learned to fill with plaster, giving them an eerie depiction of the person who died there.
The researchers behind the new study extracted DNA from 14 of the 86 plaster casts currently undergoing restoration. Despite the volcanic conditions that killed the Pompeians, traces of their genetics remain in the bones they left behind. The team found that some inhabitants were different sexes than previously thought and had different genetic relationships with each other.
One particularly famous set of remains that the team revisits is that of an adult with a gold bracelet and a child – the child lying on the adult’s lap. Long interpreted as a mother and child, the remains actually belong to an unrelated man and child. Another duo – long believed to be sisters who died together – included at least one man. Their exact relationship remains unclear, but they were not two closely related women.
“This study illustrates how unreliable narratives based on limited evidence can be, often reflecting the worldview of scientists at the time,” said co-author David Caramelli, a researcher at the Universita di Firenze, in a Cell drop.
“Most of the stories spun around the victims take into account that they were likely trying to flee the city, but these stories often link them to the location of their discovery,” Mittnik said. “For example, the man found in Villy of the Mysteries was portrayed as the custodian of the villa dutifully staying at his post.”
“Our research shows that such interpretations are often unreliable and instead we should consider a wide range of scenarios that could explain the evidence we find,” she added.
Previous genetic studies of the ancient city’s inhabitants revealed how people moved to Pompeii from other parts of the Mediterranean. A 2022 newspaper found evidence that at least one man who died there had Sardinian ancestry, in addition to bacteria associated with spinal tuberculosis.
Demographically, the team found that five individuals in Pompeii were not as genetically related to modern-day Italians and Imperial-period Etruscans as they were to groups from the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and North Africa—especially North African Jewish populations. Pompeii was an important port in first-century Rome, so it’s not a huge surprise that it had representation from across the Mediterranean—but the genetic accounts of the individuals studied bear that out.
“In my view, these findings highlight the potential of ancient DNA analysis. When integrated with bioarchaeological records, it can offer a more nuanced understanding of Pompeii’s victims,” said Gabriele Scorrano, a geneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and a researcher involved in 2022 paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “In terms of the genetic makeup of the Pompeian population, the new data are consistent with previous genomic study, suggesting a lineage strongly influenced by recent migration from the eastern Mediterranean.”
“Despite the challenges of DNA preservation in Pompeian remains, the authors did an impressive job of retrieving genetic information and providing insights into specific aspects of Pompeian life,” Scorrano added.
The study also shows that genetic research of the people of Pompeii is an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. The team wrote that “it is possible that the use of the casts as tools for storytelling led restorers to manipulate their poses and relative positioning.”
In other words, previous research and restoration work at Pompeii may have distorted the ground truth of the site – where individuals were in relation to each other when they died. Genomes don’t lie, so they give modern experts an opportunity to correct narratives that may be borne by previous attempts to dramatize the final moments of Pompeii residents in specific ways.
Pompeii is one of the most terrifying – but amazing – examples of how a disaster can provide a portal into the past. New research methods make it possible to see more through that portal than before. As genetic testing of the Pompeii remains continues—and indeed the excavation of the many still-buried parts of the city—we will gain a more complete portrait of the city swallowed by a volcano.
