Geneticists Extracted DNA From Pompeii's Casts And The Families Were Never Families

On the 24th of October, 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii, and when excavations began more than a century later an archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli developed the technique that gave the world its most recognisable image of ancient death, pouring liquid plaster into the hollow spaces left in hardened ash where bodies had decomposed and producing the people of Pompeii in the postures of their final moments. For 160 years the stories those casts appeared to tell seemed self-evident. A small figure huddled against a larger one, a child sheltering against a parent. A figure wearing an elaborate golden bracelet with a child on their lap, a mother holding her youngest. Two figures close together, sisters dying in an embrace. The groupings were read through the logic any observer would apply, people died with the people they loved, and the casts seemed to confirm everything that felt instinctively true about how human beings face death. In November 2024 a study published in Current Biology extracted ancient DNA from the skeletal material embedded inside those casts and sequenced it. The four individuals in the House of the Golden Bracelet, interpreted as a family for fifty years and displayed as such in museum exhibits, documentaries, and guidebooks, were all genetically male. The figure wearing the bracelet, identified for half a century as a mother, was a man. The child on his lap was unrelated to him. None of the four were related to each other. The sisterly embrace at a second location was, at minimum, not what the physical interpretation had described. A sex misidentification made in the 1970s became an interpretation, the interpretation became a museum caption, the caption was repeated in documentary after documentary, and the DNA needed a single study to establish that the most visited casts in Pompeii had been telling the wrong story for five decades.