DNA evidence from Pompeii contradicts long-held assumptions about victims buried in ashes

Centuries later, it turns out that long-held assumptions about some of the people of Pompeii should not be set in stone.

A new DNA analysis of skeletal remains in the doomed Roman city has revealed that some of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption in AD 79 were misidentified, showing how much modern thinking was projected onto the ancient world.

“We show that individuals' genders and family relationships are inconsistent with traditional interpretations,” wrote the authors of the study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “Modern assumptions about gender behavior may not be a reliable lens through which to view past data,” they added.

The victims of Pompeii were later immortalized by archaeologists who filled the cavities left by their bodies with plaster, and observers have long concocted stories based on these casts, long thought to be one of them about a mother holding a child and two women hugging each other as they die.

But DNA analysis showed that the person thought to be the mother was actually a man who was not related to the child, according to new research.

And at least one of the people locked in the embrace – long thought to be sisters or a mother and daughter – was a man.

“The genetic results encourage reflection on the dangers of inventing stories about gender and family relationships in past societies based on today's expectations,” one of the study's authors, Professor David Reich, said in an interview on Thursday with Harvard Medical School, where he gives lectures.

Researchers from Italy's University of Florence and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the German city of Leipzig were also involved in the study, which examined 14 casts that underwent restoration to determine gender, ancestry and determining the genetic relationships of victims for nearly 2,000 years.

Their findings also showed that residents of the seaside resort favored by wealthy Romans came from diverse backgrounds and traced their ancestry primarily to immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, highlighting the mobility of people and the multicultural nature of the Roman Empire.

Before the eruption, which lasted more than 24 hours and had the power of thousands of atomic bombs, Vesuvius was largely inactive for centuries.

An estimated 20,000 people lived in Pompeii at the time and many were engulfed in a wave of ash, pumice and mud and frozen beneath a fresh layer of volcanic sediment.

Over the centuries, Pompeii and the dead were forgotten and remained buried for almost two millennia until a farmer found part of the city under a vineyard in 1748.

Archaeologists did pioneering work in the 19th century Technique in which plaster is poured into cavities created by decomposed bodies, creating lifelike casts.

According to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, more than 100 of these casts have since been made, capturing the shapes of the victims as well as all the bones preserved over the centuries.

Research in Pompeii continues to reveal new details about the ancient city and its people, and new discoveries are constantly being made.

Earlier this year, three researchers received a $700,000 award for using artificial intelligence to decipher a 2,000-year-old scroll that was charred in the eruption.

And last year, excavations revealed people had died as a result of an earthquake and the eruption, and an opulent house was unveiled two decades after restoration began.