time volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of pompeiithe last desperate moments of the inhabitants were preserved in stone for centuries.
Observers see stories such as a mother holding her child and two women embracing each other on the verge of death in plaster casts made of their bodies.
However, new DNA evidence suggests that things were not as they seemed. And these popular interpretations come from seeing the ancient world through modern eyes.
“We disprove some of the previous stories built on how these people were found related,” said Alyssa Mittnik of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “I was able to raise my objections,” he said. “It opens up a lot of different interpretations of who these people were.”
Mitnik and his colleagues discovered that the person they thought was the child’s mother was actually a man with no relation to the child. And at least one of the two hugging people, long thought to be sisters or mother and daughter, turned out to be a man. Their study was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
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The team, which also included scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material that has been preserved for nearly 2,000 years. After Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and destroyed the Roman city, the bodies, buried in mud and ash, eventually decomposed and were left in their original locations. Castings were created from voids in the late 1800s.
The researchers focused on the 14 casts being restored and extracted DNA from the fragmented skeletons mixed in with them. They hoped to determine the victims’ gender, ancestry, and genetic relationships.
There were several surprises at the home of the mother and child, “The House of the Golden Bracelet.” The adults wore the elaborate ornaments that gave the house its name, reinforcing the impression that the victims were women. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child, believed to be the remaining members of a nuclear family.
Mitnik said DNA tests showed that the four men were unrelated and that the “stories that have been spinning around these individuals for a long time” were wrong, Mitnik said.
Researchers have also confirmed that Pompeii’s residents have diverse backgrounds but are primarily descendants of immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, which reflects broader patterns of migration and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. It’s highlighted. Pompeii is approximately 150 miles (241 km) from Rome.
The study builds on a 2022 study in which scientists sequenced the genomes of Pompeii victims for the first time, confirming the possibility of recovering ancient DNA from extant human remains.
“Because they analyzed different samples, they were able to get a better picture of what was going on in Pompeii,” said the study’s co-authors, University of Rome University College T.L., who was not involved in the study.・Gabriele Scollano of Vergata School said: “There was actually one genome, one sample, one shot.”
Although much remains to be learned, such genetic strokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past, Scolano said. Ta.
In August, Pompeii archaeologists announced that they had unearthed the remains of two more victims. man and woman He was found inside what appeared to be a bedroom of his home, trapped as the rest of the building was filled with rubble. The woman was found on the bed with a collection of gold, silver and copper coins, as well as gold earrings, pearl earrings and other jewelry.
Three researchers received awards earlier this year. Prize money of $700,000 For using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The Herculaneum papyrus is approximately 800 Greek scrolls Organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge say they were carbonized in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD that filled an ancient Roman town.
The scroll’s author is “probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” who writes “about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures,” contest organizer Nat Friedman wrote on social media.
The scrolls were discovered in a villa thought to have once belonged to Julius Caesar’s aristocratic father-in-law, whose largely unexcavated property contained a library capable of containing thousands of additional manuscripts.
