Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, killing thousands of people living in the area, all of whom would be dead by now anyway. Entire towns, most notably Pompeii, were sealed in millions of tons of ash and rock. Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder, an LMFAO-esque uncle-nephew duo, were both witnesses to the event, and PYounger’s later eyewitness accounts have proven to be a great resource in understanding what happened. Sadly, PElder was not able to give accounts of the eruption, as he Icarus-ly died trying to get close to the exploding volcano, perhaps stemming from a heart attack due to what Professor of Horticulture Jules Janick describes as his “corpulence.” But everyone knows this already. Pompeii is one of those things that every kid ends up learning about one way or another, like ancient Egypt or that one Serbian woman who survived her plane exploding 30,000 feet above the ground. There’s something in Pompeii for everyone: a big volcanic eruption, funny graffiti, beautiful frescoes, a heartbreaking compacted ash outline of a mother holding her child. It’s like the Titanic.
But wait, let’s go back to that mother and her child. New DNA evidence suggests that the alleged mother and child are actually a man and a child who have no genetic familial link. Additionally, many of the casts created from the ash-fossilized bodies were manipulated, calling into question interpretations made at first blush. The paper “Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts,” published in “Current Biology” by Elena Pilli et al., used the skeletal material left in the plaster casts to generate genomic data about the victims, “contradict[ing] prior narratives about the victims’ identities and relationships.”
They attempted this extraction “using enrichment of ancient DNA extracts for mitochondrial DNA,” and compared these to millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were sampled from 225 ancient humans in “The genomic history of southeastern Europe” by Mathieson, I., Alpaslan-Roodenberg, S., Posth, C. et al.
In addition to the pop-science-obliterating findings about the sexes and familial relationships of these long-dead corpses, the study also found that the tested individuals were genetically close “with eastern Mediterranean, Levantine, and North African Jewish populations,” corroborating previous DNA analysis done on the Pompeii victims.
Additionally, it turns out that at least one of two bodies found in an embrace that was considered female was actually male, and the researchers were able to use the ratio of two isotopes of Strontium in a different man’s skeleton to estimate a general location of origin for him.
Readers who want to learn more are invited to read the paper themselves, which we can all do thanks to our Carnegie Mellon credentials.
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