The genetic heritage of one of the victims who sadly perished about 2,000 years ago when the Italian city of Pompeii was destroyed by a volcanic eruption.Scientists have now sequenced the genome of a man who died in the Pompeiian House of the Craftsman when he was in his forties. It revealed his genetic profile and, more intriguingly, the fact that he contracted tuberculosis during his existence.
According to the scientific studies of the genome sequencing, it indicates that the Italian Peninsula had a high level of genetic variety during the lifetime.
Mount Vesuvius' eruption is regarded as one of the most disastrous volcanic disasters in human history. The volcano erupted in 70 CE, killing thousands of people in the surrounding cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, as well as other communities.The victims were either murdered or suffocated by the gas, ash, and pumice that poured down from the sky when the volcano sent pyroclastic surges racing through its surrounds.
Because such high temperatures essentially destroy the bone matrix where DNA lives, it was previously considered that DNA from the victims would be unusable for examination.The ash that buried the victims and sealed their fate for nearly two millennia, on the other hand, could have worked as a barrier against environmental variables that cause additional degradation, such as oxygen.
Previous attempts to examine the DNA of ancient Pompeiians used polymerase chain reaction techniques, which yielded small pieces of DNA from human and animal victims, implying that some genomic information had survived the volcano's and time's devastation.
Recent breakthroughs in genome sequencing, on the other hand, have substantially enhanced the amount of data that can be extracted from DNA segments that were previously too degraded to be useful. Archaeologist Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome and his colleagues attempted to apply these techniques to the bones of two human Vesuvius victims in their new study.
The two were discovered in a single chamber of the Casa del Fabbro, or House of the Craftsman. The first person was a male who was roughly 164.3 centimetres (5 feet, 4 inches) tall and was between 35 and 40 years old at the time of death.
The second person was a female who was over 50 years old at the time of her death and stood roughly 153.1 centimetres (5 feet) tall. Both of these statures are comparable to Roman averages of the period.The researchers collected DNA from these people's petrous bones, which are among the densest bones in the body and hence among the most likely to retain viable DNA.
Furthermore, material was collected and sequenced from both bones using the same methods. Only the man's bone, on the other hand, gave enough DNA for a meaningful analysis.
The sample was compared to genomes from 1,030 ancient and 471 modern western Eurasian people. The findings indicate that the individual was Italian, with the majority of his DNA matching that of people from central Italy, both ancient and modern.However, some genes were discovered on the island of Sardinia that are not prevalent in persons from the Italian mainland.
Given how much the ancient Romans travelled about and how many slaves they imported from various countries, this makes sense. However, the man's large amount of DNA linked to the Italian population shows that he was not a slave.
Surprisingly, DNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, was found in the genetic material extracted from his petrous bone. A close examination of his vertebrae revealed that he had spinal tuberculosis, a disease that affects the spine.This is supported by written documents from Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Galen, Caelius Aurelianus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, all of whom lived around the same time. During the Roman Empire, the advent of an urban lifestyle and the resulting increasing population densities aided the spread of tuberculosis, which was likely not uncommon.
None of these findings are particularly surprising, but the fact that they were discovered at all is remarkable, and the breakthrough suggests that we may now have a fresh insight into the lives of the Pompeiians, whose deaths were so shocking.