Scientists are sometimes victims of their prejudices or, simply, of the cultural and historical context in which they work. Like everyone else. When, in the 19thmy 19th century, plaster silhouettes of the victims of the terrible eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD appear in Pompeii (Italy), interpretations are proposed. They will be etched in stone in scientific publications and tourist brochures. Assumptions became truths… until today.
The study carried out by an international team published on November 7 in Current biology casts doubt on the certainties about the plaster casts of these people trapped by death. What was thought to be a woman holding her child on her lap in those fatal minutes… was actually a man, with no genetic relationship to the child. Two characters intertwined in death would not ultimately be the two sisters that we thought we saw nor, another hypothesis, a mother and her daughter, since one of the two was a man.
Why did researchers want to challenge such a moving narrative? An international team of biologists, anthropologists, geneticists and archaeologists from the University of Florence (Italy) and the American universities of Harvard and California managed to recover DNA fragments from these famous Pompeian molds. And he analyzed them.
Population mix
During the first excavations following the rediscovery in the 18th centurymy century of this buried city of Roman Antiquity, many victims had been discovered in homes or even in public places. A century later, the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli (1823-1896) developed a method for making casts of victims trapped in a layer of priyoclastic ash. It involves pouring liquid plaster into the gaps left by the decomposition of soft tissue.
Using Fiorelli’s method, a total of 104 plaster casts were produced that preserved the shape of the victims and covered their bones. During a restoration of these models in 2015, an x-ray taken of twenty-six of them revealed that none contained a complete skeleton… and that the silhouettes of some had been redrawn quite freely.
Elena Pilli, the first signatory of the study, David Reich, Alissa Mittnik and their colleagues managed to work with fragmented bone remains mixed with plaster from fourteen models in the process of restoration. “We generated genome-wide ancient DNA and strontium isotope data to characterize the genetic relationships, sex, ancestry, and mobility of five individuals. », they write. These genomic data also reveal the presence of immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, confirming the mixing of populations at the time of the Roman Empire.
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