DNA rewrites the history of Pompeii: The woman with the bracelet was a man and his son was not her son. Science

An international investigation has applied the latest genetic analysis techniques to the bones of 14 residents of the city of Pompeii who died under tons of ash during the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 of the present era. The volcanic eruption buried the entire city – and was preserved over time. In the mid-18th century, a soldier named Joaquín de Alcubierre, Roque of Zaragoza, began excavating the city under the orders of its king, Charles III. Alcubierre was from the Corps of Engineers and invented his own way of doing archaeology: instead of open-air sites, he dug unstable underground galleries where sculptures, frescoes and objects from the city of Pompeii soon appeared, although the first sappers believed That was Stabia, a nearby port.

The buried corpses were almost hollow from inside. In the 19th century, Italian archaeologists began filling them with plaster. Once dried, they removed the ashes and outer stone and obtained wonderful figures of the deceased; Some are groaning in pain, some are lying quietly. Among them, moving figures emerge, such as a woman wearing a gold bracelet with her child in her arms, or two sisters united in a strange embrace moments before dying.

In 2015, archaeological authorities at this mythological site near Naples, south of Rome, decided to restore 86 statues of the dead. Bones were found mixed with plaster inside. A team of researchers from Italy, Germany and the United States tried to save genetic material and chemical compounds from 14 victims, and managed to recover them from five. The results published this Thursday show that nothing is as it seems.

The figure of mother and son is so iconic that archaeologists named the luxurious villa in which they were found the Golden Bracelet. In 1974, four bodies were found there, including those of a supposed mother and son, and it was believed that they were a family who died while fleeing the explosion. Now, analysis of their DNA shows that all of those who died were men. The alleged woman wearing a dazzling jewel weighing over 30 carats was actually a middle-aged man who was no relation to the five-year-old child she was carrying.

The cast traditionally said to be two sisters, consisting of two figures embracing, the head of one near the pubis of the other, actually corresponds to a man and the other to a man whose sex could not be determined. Previous investigation had revealed that they were two men, probably lovers. The results have been published this Thursday

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Alissa Mitnik, archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and lead author of the study, told this newspaper that, although DNA studies had been conducted on some victims of the explosion a few years earlier, this is the largest study to date. Done till date. “In most cases no molds of the victims were made and only their skeletons are preserved. We are analyzing many of them,” he highlighted.

Mitnick comments: “Today, researchers try to avoid bias and recognize uncertainties when interpreting archaeological evidence.” “However,” he adds, “ideas that more closely match contemporary attitudes or that are more sensational often attract greater public interest and spread more widely. But the findings of this study suggest a number of alternative explanations.” Underscores the importance of being open to the wide range that can be evaluated by integrating diverse scientific methods.”

Anthropologist Davide Carmeli of the University of Florence acknowledges: “This research shows how genetic analysis can make an important contribution to the stories constructed from archaeological data.” The co-authors of the work say that these findings “challenge persistent assumptions, such as the association of jewelery with femininity, or the interpretation of physical closeness as evidence of familial ties.”

The study also provides insight into where Pompeii’s inhabitants came from, whose origins were largely in the eastern Mediterranean. Iñigo Olalde, a geneticist at the University of the Basque Country, who has not participated in this study, highlights the interest of these new data. “We think that the majority of people in Imperial Rome were from the Italian peninsula, but at that time many people came from more eastern regions such as Turkey, the Middle East or Greece, where Rome’s real demographic strength was”, details. This is a population profile that was also found in the inhabitants of Rome and the Balkans during the Empire in a study published in 2023 and whose first author was Olalde.

Patxy Pérez-Ramallo, a Galician archaeologist working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, highlighted: “This study questions the adventurous and sometimes speculative interpretations presented in guided tours or archaeological readings based solely on the context. Let’s go.” The researchers say, “This work allows us to advance our knowledge of Roman society in the first century and allows specialized historians and archaeologists to make deeper interpretations and compare their knowledge with the results provided by this study.” It also provides a basis for

CSIC geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, ​​believes the study “demonstrates how we project our gender stereotypes into the past, when the reality is perhaps more interesting.” “At the very least,” he adds, “I found a man with a gold bracelet holding a child to whom he had no relation, which is more suggestive.” This brings us to the site of possibly the most iconic archaeological site in Europe. Gives a new view of the evidence.”