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In the early 1930s, archaeologists in Pompeii made a remarkable discovery: the skeleton of a man who died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, uncovered at the Casa del Fabbro, or Blacksmith’s House, was found covered with pumice and He had once been leaning against a wooden sofa, his arms folded under his head and his feet on the floor.
The figure in her pose reminds one of the character Casanova, played by Marcello Mastroianni in the 1961 movie “Italian-Style Divorce”. The “sciupafemmine” embodied in Mastroianni, the ideal Italian man of the 20th century, had an air of surrender, a touch of melancholy that suggested laziness and a lifetime of romantic disaster. Italian actress and writer Marta Mondelli described him as “a seductive man who, though not necessarily beautiful, likes to be alone as much as he loves women and their company”.
“In the movie, Mastroianni wants to save the world from his boring wife, who asks him to say she loves him,” said Fabio Macciardi, professor of molecular psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine. “Exhausted, she rushes out of the bedroom, prepares a sofa, and dreams of flirting with her young cousin. That’s how I picture the Pompeii man.”
Dr. Macciardi is part of a team of geneticists and archaeologists that appeared in the journalism Thursday. Scientific Reports that they have successfully sequenced the genome of this hypothetical lazy Latina. It was the first time that a complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA from Pompeian human or animal remains had been genetically decoded.
“The study is exciting because it shows that DNA is preserved from cities buried by the eruption of Vesuvius despite the high temperatures,” said Harvard geneticist David Reich, who was not involved in the research.
The authors of the paper, geneticist Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Copenhagen and funerary archaeologist Serena Viva of the University of Salento, think that the ash and pumice released during the eruption may have provided protection from environmental factors such as the atmosphere that degrade DNA. oxygen.
The idea for the project was coined by anthropologist Pier Francesco Fabbri in 2017. sarcastically, Dr. Macciardi and Dr. He asked Scorrano to help him line up one of his elder ancestors at Casa del Fabbro.
Dr. “The joke is that Fabbri is the plural of Fabbro,” Macciardi said. Although excavated in the early 1930s, the skeleton remained in the dining room during the devastating earthquake of 1980. Only in 2016, during the restoration of the house, the body was removed for study.
Dr. Scorrano and Dr. They extracted DNA from the remains of a man and woman lying on the floor of the room with Serena crossed with her arms tightly clasped on the edge of a sofa. Between her feet was a small cloth bag containing 26 silver coins. “What were they doing there?” said. “Did they finish their meal and be taken by surprise? Were they about to sleep? Maybe they were looking for shelter.”
At the time of the disaster, Pompeii is thought to have had a population of about 12,000. Most people fled; only about 1,200 bodies were recovered. Forensic analysis of the two Casa del Fabbro bodies revealed that the man was about 35 years old and the woman was over 50 years old. Dr. “It could be his mother, aunt, or wife,” Macciardi said. The researchers targeted DNA stored in petrous bone, a very dense bone that surrounds the inner ear. But they can only sequence genetic material from male cadavers.
Comparing their DNA with genetic material from 1,030 other ancient and 471 modern West Eurasian peoples revealed that their genetic makeup was most similar to the ancient peoples living around Rome during the first few centuries of the Imperial Period.
Dr. “Modern and Central Italians seem to be genetically different due to medieval events,” Reich said. “The findings are consistent with the possibility that the people of Pompeii may be part of the same population as the people of the city of Rome, about 150 miles away.”
Investigators concluded that some of the Pompeii people’s ancestry came from the island of Sardinia and some from Anatolia, the Asian part of modern Turkey. This corroborates data from a previous paper that concluded that the Italian peninsula was a hotbed of genetic diversity two thousand years ago.
Why was the Pompeii man sleeping? Tuberculous spondylitis, a spinal disease also known as Pott’s disease, was detected in the DNA sequence. Common symptoms are back pain, lower extremity weakness, and paraplegia. Dr. “The situation would have forced him to have very little mobility,” Fabbri said. “The old woman next to him suffered from arthrosis, so he stood there and waited, guarding a small treasure trove of coins.”
Dr. Macciardi, Dr. He was unimpressed by Fabbri’s identification of his own proto-Mastroianni. “I imagine him lying on the couch eating lunch, battling back pain, and thinking about how he’s going to get his wife out and marry his younger cousin in the old Italian way,” he said. “Then the volcano erupts and sinks into pumice.”
There is an old Italian proverb: La morte mi trovera vivo. Death will find me alive.
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