A new DNA analysis of Pompeii victims has challenged the stories told about the last moments of the ancient city's people.
What Is Pompeii?
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D. destroyed Pompeii, a flourishing city located in present-day Italy, and left its people to slowly die from the gases and ash that the volcano released into the air.
Ash and volcanic rock that covered the people's bodies preserved their final moments.
In the 1880s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli made plaster casts of 104 of the Pompeii victims by pouring liquid chalk into the ash shell of bodies once made of soft tissue that had since decomposed.
Researchers 'Disprove' Old Stories With DNA
Researchers from Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Florance in Italy, used genetic material preserved in some of the casts in hopes of determining the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships between the Pompeii victims.
In their study, which was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the researchers examined the fragmented skeletal remains mixed into 14 casts.
"We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other," Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said to The Associated Press. "It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been."
What Did the Study Find?
What was thought to be a mother holding a child was actually a man unrelated to the child, according to the study. And one of the two women locked in an embrace, which was thought to be two sisters or a mother and daughter, was actually a man, the study shows.
One Pompeii dwelling, known as "the house of the golden bracelet," was thought to hold a mother and child. The house was named after an intricate piece of jewelry that the adult wore, which further gave the impression that the adult was a woman. The bodies of another adult and child found nearby were thought to be the rest of their nuclear family.
The study, however, found that the four victims in the house were male and not related to each other. This clearly showed that "the story that was long spun around these individuals" was wrong, Mittnik said.
Meanwhile, the study confirmed that the citizens of Pompeii, which is over a two-hour drive from Rome, had diverse backgrounds but were mainly descended from eastern Mediterranean immigrants.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
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