How DNA changed the identity of Pompeii victims

HostMost of us have seen those haunting shapes from the ruins of Pompeii. They look like stone people frozen in their final moments, and for hundreds of years, we thought we knew exactly who they were based on how they were lying or who they were holding. But it turns out the stories we told about them might have been wrong the whole time. How do we suddenly know that the people we were looking at for three centuries weren't who we thought?

GuestIt all comes down to what's hidden inside those shapes. When people think of those figures, they usually think of them as statues made of ash. But they're actually plaster casts. Back in the eighteen hundreds, the people digging up the city found these hollow gaps in the hard ash. Those gaps were left behind when the bodies of the victims rotted away thousands of years ago. To save the shapes, the diggers poured plaster into the holes. When the plaster dried, they chipped away the ash and found these perfect, life-like models of people. The thing is, the bones were still in there. The plaster wrapped right around the skeletons. For a long time, no one could get to those bones without breaking the beautiful casts. But now, we have ways to get tiny bits of bone out of the plaster to look at the DNA. When a team of experts finally did that recently, the results blew everyone away. It showed that our eyes had been lying to us for a very long time.

HostWait, if the bones were always there, why did it take us so long to look at them? Was it just that we didn't want to break the art, or did we just think we already had the answers?

GuestIt was a bit of both. We're very good at making up stories that fit what we see. When you see a large person with a gold bracelet holding a small child on their lap, your brain says that's a mother. For three hundred years, that was the story of the House of the Golden Bracelet. Everyone who visited the ruins saw that cast and felt for that poor mother and her child. But when the team tested the DNA from those bones, they found out the adult was actually a man. And even more surprising, the child he was holding wasn't related to him at all. They were just two people who happened to be together when the sky fell. We spent centuries projecting our own ideas of family and care onto them, but the genes tell a much more messy and complicated story.

HostThat's a huge shift. I mean, we basically built a whole myth around a person because they were wearing a piece of jewelry. But if we can be that wrong about a mother and child, what else did we get twisted?

GuestThere's another famous pair that people used to call the two sisters. They were found huddled together, and one was resting their head on the other. It was such a sad, sweet image of two women facing the end together. Later, some people started to think they might be a man and a woman who were in love. But the DNA test showed that at least one of them was definitely a man, and the other likely was too. They weren't sisters. They might not even have been a couple. They were just two men in a terrible spot. This happens over and over again in the new data. We look at a pose and think we see a husband and wife or a grandmother and a kid, but the science shows that the people in these houses were often not related by blood at all.

HostI find myself wondering if the DNA could be wrong. These bones have been sitting in damp plaster for ages, and then they were handled by the people who found them. Is it possible the results are just picked up from the people who did the digging?

GuestThat's a fair point, and it's something the scientists had to be very careful about. DNA can break down over time, especially in heat, and the volcano was definitely hot. But they use very deep cleaning methods and only look for specific markers that stay locked deep inside the densest part of the bone, like the inner ear. They also look for patterns that only show up in ancient DNA, which looks different from the DNA of a living person who might have touched it yesterday. What they found wasn't just a one-off mistake. They saw a whole mix of people from all over the world. Many of the victims weren't even from Italy originally. They had roots in the Middle East and North Africa. This tells us Pompeii was way more diverse than we thought. It wasn't just a bunch of local Roman families. It was a crossroads of the world.

HostSo we weren't just wrong about their gender or their families. We were wrong about where they even came from. It sounds like we were looking at Pompeii through a very narrow lens.

GuestWe really were. We tend to think of the past as being very simple and traditional. We see a house and we assume a nuclear family lived there. But Pompeii was a place of trade and slavery and travel. The people in a house might be servants, friends, or strangers seeking cover. By only looking at the poses, we were making the past look like a mirror of our own lives. The DNA is like a cold splash of water. It forces us to stop telling our own stories and actually listen to theirs. It shows us that the Roman world was just as full of movement and strange connections as our world is today.

HostThe gold bracelet that gave that man his fake identity for so long is still there, but it means something totally different now.

GuestThat man died wearing his finest things, and for a long time, those things defined him as a mother in our minds.

HostThe plaster shapes are still the same, but the people inside them have finally been allowed to be themselves.