DNA From Pompeii Victims Reveals Surprising Relationships Amidst the Chaos

A handful of people in Pompeii that were killed by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 are not who experts thought they were, according to a team of researchers that recently collected DNA from the individuals’ remains.

The team’s findings—published today in Current Biology—spotlight previous incorrect conclusions about relationships between the residents of Pompeii and reveals new insights about the demographics of the Ancient Roman port city.

“We show that the large genetic diversity with significant influences from the Eastern Mediterranean was not only a phenomenon in the metropolis of Rome during Imperial times but extends to the much smaller city of Pompeii, which underscores 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 dash and debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79. Vesuvius also destroyed the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, where experts found carbonized scrolls that AI models can now unwrap without damaging the texts. Under the feet of ash, Pompeii’s buildings, streets, and artworks—vestiges of its daily life—were remarkably well preserved.

The people weren’t so lucky. They died while being bombarded by pyroclastic flows—fast-moving clouds of superheated gas, ash, and dust—though some of them may have lived for hours before final succumbing to the extreme conditions. Their remains decayed long ago, besides their skeletons. But they left behind human-shaped voids in the hardened ash which early investigators of Pompeii learned to fill with plaster, giving them an eerie cast 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 off the Pompeians, traces of their genetics remain in the bones they left behind. The team found that some residents were different sexes than previously thought, and had different genetic relationships with one another.

One particularly famous set of remains revisited by the team is that of an adult with a golden bracelet and a child—the child being on the adult’s lap. Long interpreted as a mother and child, the remains actually belong to an unrelated male and a child. Another duo—long thought to be sisters who died together—included at least one male. Their exact relationship remains unclear, but they weren’t two closely related females.

“This study illustrates how unreliable narratives based on limited evidence can be, often reflecting the worldview of the researchers at the time,” said co-author David Caramelli, a researcher at the Universita di Firenze, in a Cell release.

“Most narratives spun around the victims take into account that they were likely attempting to flee the city, but these stories often link them to their discovery place,” Mittnik said. “For instance, the man found at the Villy of the Mysteries was portrayed as the custodian of the villa who dutifully remained at his post.”

“Our research demonstrates 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 residents revealed how people moved 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 bacteria associated with spinal tuberculosis.

Demographically, the team found that five individuals in Pompeii weren’t so genetically associated with modern-day Italians and Imperial-period Etruscans as they were to groups from the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and North Africa—specifically 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 stories of the studied individuals verifies it.

“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 the 2022 paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Regarding the genetic makeup of the Pompeian population, the new data aligns with previous genomic study, suggesting an ancestry 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, providing insights into specific aspects of Pompeian life, Scorrano added.

The study also shows that genetic research of the people in Pompeii is an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. The team wrote that “it is possible that the exploitation of the casts as vehicles for storytelling led to the manipulation of their poses and relative positioning by restorers in the past.”

In other words, previous research and restoration work in Pompeii may have distorted the ground truth at the site—where individuals were relative to one another when they died. The genomes don’t lie, so they give modern experts an opportunity to correct narratives that may be borne out of previous attempts to dramatize the final moments of Pompeii residents in specific ways.

Pompeii is one of the most horrifying—but amazing—examples of how a disaster can provide a portal into the past. New research methods are making it possible to see more through that portal than before. As genetic testing of the Pompeii remains continues—and indeed, excavation of the many still-buried parts of the city—we’ll get a more complete portrait of the city swallowed by a volcano.