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1,943 years ago, a man in his mid 30s was buried under the burning ashes of Mount Vesuvius, as it pummeled the Roman city of Pompeii.
His is now the first full genetic profile to have been sequenced by geneticists on the bodies from the victims of Pompeii, revealing incredible detail about exactly who was living in south-central Italy at the time.
Pompeii is one of the most rewarding archeological sites on Earth, with every decade revealing a suit of new discoveries as the full extent of the city continues to be revealed, always in stunning detail.
Now in a new paper published today in Scientific Reports Gabriele Scorrano and his colleagues showed they were able to extract DNA from a male individual found in the House of Craftsmen, and sequence his entire genome.
Comparisons of the male individual’s DNA with DNA obtained from 1,030 other ancient and 471 modern western Eurasian individuals suggested that his DNA shared the most similarities with modern central Italians and other individuals who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age.
However, analyses of the male individual’s mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA also identified groups of genes that are commonly found in those from the island of Sardinia, but not among other individuals who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age.
