Literature and film has long perpetuated narratives around the people enshrined in one of Italy’s most popular tourist attractions and second-most visited archaeological site in the county, visited by 4 million people per year: Victims buried alive by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 in their daily routines, whose bodies remained in the same position as the ash hit them. When the skin and tissues these tissues eventually decayed, leaving casts around them that enabled 18th-century archaeologists and beyond to reproduce their 3-dimensional positioning, poignant stories of these people arose, such as a grouping identified as a nuclear family with two females embracing. But geneticists at Harvard and University of Florence—armed with newly analyzed DNA evidence–suggest that previous hypotheses have been incorrect, for example positing the 4-persom grouping actually comprises 4 unrelated individuals of different gender combinations than thought. One revelation: the genetic diversity discovered highlights the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman Empire in the period. Other takeaways: visually reconstructing the past is unreliable, and it can be tricky measuring how people are related to each other based on DNA or their molecular sex.
