DNA analysis reveals Pompeii victims were not who archaeologists once believed

DNA analysis reveals certain Pompeii victims weren’t biologically related, challenging long-held assumptions about their family roles and identities.

Transcript

00:00For many of these victims,

00:29victims that have been excavated now for hundreds of years,

00:33they've evoked kind of these stories with the anthropologists and archaeologists

00:38of like who these people might have been and how they experienced their last

00:42moments of life and this catastrophe.

00:44So for example,

00:46there was a group of individuals,

00:48two adults and two children found in close vicinity of each other.

00:53And this was always interpreted as being a mother with her child.

00:57And then the other adult nearby was interpreted as the father.

01:02So this would be a nuclear family, for example.

01:05And what we found is that in fact,

01:08all four of these individuals were male,

01:11which disproves this theory that they would be father,

01:15mother and two children.

01:16And on top of that,

01:17they were in fact not biologically related to each other.

01:27Our scientific results on the basis of DNA just give additional insight into

01:42the previous archaeological and anthropological analysis and kind of

01:48makes us rethink how these people,

01:52like who these people actually were,

01:54how they related to each other,

01:56and how they behaved in these last moments of their life.