News from Italy
Who are those people in Pompeii?
Touching figures frozen in time… A mother embracing her son, two sisters embracing each other… The secret of these moulds found in Pompeii was solved precisely 1945 years after the eruption of Vesuvius…
With the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, pumice stones rained down from the sky on Pompeii, located at the foot of the mountain. Tremors shook the ground. Buildings and roofs were destroyed. Fluid magma, consisting of ash, gas and rocks, quickly burned and scorched the city. Pompeii was covered with a pile of ash and lava 6 meters deep. It is estimated that the population of Pompeii at the time of the disaster was approximately 20,000, and roughly 10 per cent of these people lost their lives due to the eruption of Vesuvius.
The bodies of hundreds of people who lost their lives in this disaster remained as they were in the piles of rubble accumulated around them. As the soft tissues decayed over the centuries, perfectly preserved hollow moulds resembling human-made sculptures remained.
Person and child with bracelets
The first systematic excavations in the ruins of Pompeii began in 1748, but only a little progress was made until 1860, when archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was appointed. In 1863, archaeologists began filling these moulds with plaster and making copies of what the victims experienced during the disaster. In this process, two groups of victims especially stood out.
One of them contained a child and two adults. An ornament on the arm of one of the adults attracted attention. In this person’s lap was a child who appeared to be lying on his knee. Because of the bracelet on her arm and how she held the child, it was thought that these were a mother and her son, barely old enough to be called a baby.
Archaeologists named this community the Golden Bracelet House Family based on their jewellery.
two young girls
On the other hand, the group of two bodies embracing each other with love was called Two Young Girls. It was believed that these were two sisters or a young mother and her daughter.
To date, casts of 104 Vesuvius victims have been made using the plaster technique developed by Fiorelli.
However, modern developments in science and technology have disproved all predictions about these groups.
In the study published in the science journal Current Biology, DNA tests performed on the skeletal remains left in the moulds revealed that no assumptions about these people’s identities and relationships were correct.
The study, which focused on 14 of 104 patterns, was carried out by a group of scientists, including geneticist David Reich from Harvard University and anthropologist David Caramelli from the University of Florence.
Caramelli, who managed to access bone fragments in 2015 when the plaster casts were restored, was initially sceptical that they would be able to obtain DNA samples from these pieces. However, the efforts yielded results and succeeded in deciphering mitochondrial DNA, genetic data passed from mother to child.
Mother and son…
Accordingly, it was determined that the two people who were previously thought to be mothers and sons were two men, one adult and the other a child and that there was no biological bond between them. In other words, the entire group of four people consisted of men.
More importantly, contrary to the prevailing opinion, no consanguinity could be found between three of these four people. In contrast, the fourth was determined not to be related to the others, at least not on the mother’s side.
Geneticist Alissa Mittnik, who works in the Harvard University laboratory where the data was analysed, said, “We have disproved the archaeologists’ predictions that these four people were a nuclear family. However, of course, we do not know who these people are and what kind of relationship there is between them, so we cannot say anything definitive about this.”
Mittnik said, “It is possible that these people were servants or slaves or that the children were the children of servants or slaves living in the same house.”
The sisters…
On the other hand, genome sequencing studies have confirmed that at least one of the two young girls who were thought to be mother-daughter or siblings is male. Dr. “Here we can say that one of them is genetically male, and there is no maternal relationship between them,” Mittnik said.
Stating that people hugging each other can be a couple, Dr. Mittnik said, “Since adoption was a widespread practice during the Roman Empire, it is possible that these people saw each other as siblings.”
Dr. “Once again, this is a case where the clearest or most insightful explanation in the image does not match the scientific data,” Mittnik said. It was also confirmed that the person found alone in a room of a wealthy household known as the Villa of Mysteries was a man.
They came from the Aegean and The Levant
Dr. Mittnik emphasised that the most surprising thing about the people of Pompeii was their genetic diversity, which reflected the cosmopolitan structure of the Roman Empire.
Dr. Mittnik emphasised that this structure was formed through migrations, slavery, conquests, and trade channels. At the time of the disaster, the trade routes of the Roman Empire extended from North Africa to Asia. People moved to Rome, sometimes by choice and sometimes by force.
Dr. Mittnik said, “Some of the people whose genome structures we were able to create had genetic heritage similar to Eastern Mediterranean people. The genomes of these people may match people in the Aegean or the Levant region. Therefore, these may be people who have recently migrated from these regions or the grandchildren of people who have migrated in the past.”
It was previously known that Rome had a cosmopolitan structure, but the emergence of a similar situation in Pompeii confirmed the researchers’ predictions. “The results confirm that migration was widespread and ‘cosmopolitan’ throughout the empire,” said Ron Pinhasi, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Vienna. Gianni Gallello, a researcher from the University of Valencia, said that when genetic inheritance data were combined with the fact that the people were not related, the possibility emerged that the victims were slaves sent to Pompeii from various parts of the Roman Empire. Gallello said, “It is always good to have new data. In this way, a new path has been opened once again about the history of the population of Pompeii.”
