Pompeii DNA evidence contradicts long-held assumptions about victims buried in ash
New DNA analysis of skeletal remains from Pompeii reveals that victims of Vesuvius’s eruption have been wrongly identified.
Centuries on and it turns out that long-held assumptions about some of the people of Pompeii should not have been set in stone.
New DNA analysis of skeletal remains in the doomed Roman town has revealed that some of the victims of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79 have been wrongly identified, highlighting how much modern day thinking has been projected onto the ancient world.
“We show that the individuals’ sexes and family relationships do not match traditional interpretations,” wrote the authors of the research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “Modern assumptions about gendered behaviors may not be reliable lenses through which to view data from the past,” they added.
Pompeii's victims were later immortalized by archaeologists who used plaster to fill the voids left by their bodies and observers have long created stories based on these casts, one of which was long assumed to be a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they died.
But the DNA analysis has shown the person thought to be the mother was actually a man who was unrelated to the child, according to the new research.
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