Humans

The ancient town of Pompeii was buried under hot volcanic ash in AD 79, but DNA still survives in the bones of the people who died in the disaster

Humans

26 May 2022

By Colin Barras
The two individuals found in the Casa del Fabbro in PompeiiNotizie degli Scavi di Antichità, 1934, p. 286, fig. 10
The hot volcanic ash that buried the ancient Roman town of Pompeii killed many of the town’s inhabitants – but it didn’t destroy their DNA. The first complete genome from Pompeii reveals genetic markers that haven’t been seen before in ancient Roman DNA.
Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy is the only active volcano in mainland Europe. It erupted to devastating effect in AD 79, burying several Roman settlements including Herculaneum to the west of Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii to the southeast.
The volcanic ash that covered Pompeii is estimated to have been at least 250°C – hot enough to kill people instantly and, presumably, cause significant damage to their internal tissues and DNA.Advertisement
“There was the expectation that the high temperatures would make our effort in DNA sequencing in Pompeii fruitless,” says Gabriele Scorrano at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “Cremated bodies, for example, show no sign of DNA preservation according to multiple studies.”
But Scorrano and his colleagues decided to look for ancient DNA anyway. They focused on the skeletal remains of two people discovered in a building called the Casa del Fabbro, which translates to House of the Craftsman. The pair – a man in his 30s and a woman who was at least 50 years old – seem to have been lying on a low couch in what may have been a dining room at the moment they died.

The researchers managed to obtain genetic material from both skeletons, although only the man’s bones yielded enough DNA to piece together a full genome. Scorrano and his colleagues then compared the man’s genome with those from 1030 ancient people who lived during the last 5000 years or so and 471 present-day people from western Eurasia. This revealed the man from Pompeii had DNA comparable to that recovered from the skeletons of people who lived in Italy at the height of the Roman Empire.
There were also differences. In particular, groups of genes on the man’s Y chromosome and in his mitochondrial DNA were unlike those seen in earlier studies of ancient Romans but similar to sequences carried by some people living today on the Italian island of Sardinia.
“Undoubtedly, there is still a lot to study about genetics of the past peoples in the Italian peninsula,” says Scorrano.
It is only because of improvements in analytical techniques that we can now extract DNA from the skeletons preserved at Pompeii, says Pier Paolo Petrone at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He says the work shows there are “always new discoveries” to be made even at such world-famous sites.
There were also hints of bacterial DNA in the bone sample collected from the ancient man. These are consistent with existing evidence from the state of his skeleton that he had spinal tuberculosis.
“This pathology causes severe pain, such as lumbago and sciatica,” says Scorrano. This might explain why the man didn’t flee when the eruption began, as many Pompeiians did. Instead, he remained in the town – which proved to be a fateful choice.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-10899-1
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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

25 May 2022

Josie Ford
Emissions cuts
Feedback’s recent item on the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s journal pondering the metaphysics of farting – “Is it a thing or an action?” being the chief question – has drawn short shrift from reader Guy Cox. He believes the author should have used that essential method of philosophical inquiry known as “looking it up in a dictionary”. Cox also points out that the subject has previously been expounded on by no less a personage than US writer, inventor and all-round genius Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin wrote an entire essay urging his fellow natural philosophers to investigate whether they could develop food … More

Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts’s informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

Humans

25 May 2022

By Michael Marshall

FEW groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain … More

Ornette Made In America, USA, 1985. Courtesy of Barbican Centre.
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Journeys across Afro-futurism traces Black futures through the medium of film, featuring Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Nyokabi Gethaiga and others. At the Barbican Centre, London, from 2 to 30 June.

Read
Beyond Measure documents humanity’s attempts to claw dependable truths from a chaotic universe. James Vincent’s gripping story of how and why we measure just about everything, from radiation to happiness, is published on 2 June.
Michael Desmond/Hulu
Watch
The Orville begins its third season. Starring Adrianne Palicki as Commander Kelly Grayson and Seth MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer, they’re out to find strange … More

Finding out how acidic or alkaline your soil is means you can select the right plants for it, and maximise their chance of thriving, says Clare Wilson

Humans

25 May 2022

By Clare Wilson
mblickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
HAVE you ever wondered why some plants in your garden thrive, while others barely grow no matter how tenderly they are nurtured? It may not come down to your green fingers, but to whether you have chosen the right plant for that spot.
Most people know they need to consider their local climate and how much sunshine any particular site gets. But you should also choose the right plant for your soil type, which depends on your area’s geology and history. You can find maps of soil type online, but gardens can differ at a local level.
A first step … More

This documentary tracks the quest for the oldest human footprints in North America, and what they can tell us about when people first arrived on the continent

Humans

23 May 2022

By Carissa Wong
Ancient footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park.GBH/NOVA/WGBH
Ice Age Footprints
Directed by Bella Falk and David Dugan
On PBS on 25 May at 9PM EST, then streaming at pbs.org/nova
IN January 2020, in a secret location within White Sands Park, New Mexico, geologists Kathleen Springer and Jeffrey Pigati began to dig out a trench in search of ancient human footprints. They hoped to shed light on two long-standing questions about the history of humans in North America: how long ago did people first arrive, and did humans … More

By Corryn Wetzel
Fossilised human faeces from Durrington Walls, EnglandLisa-Marie Shillito
The people who built Stonehenge probably ate cattle organs and shared leftovers with dogs, according to an analysis of parasites trapped in ancient faeces.
Fossilised excrement roughly 4500 years old was discovered several years ago at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement in England thought to have housed the people who built Stonehenge. Previous research suggests the village held a few thousand residents who travelled to the location seasonally to erect the stone pillars.
Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge and his team analysed 19 faecal fossils, determining that some were from humans and some from dogs. When they examined the faeces under a microscope, they saw the eggs of a type of parasite called a capillariid worm, which they could identify from its lemon-like shape. This led them to conclude that the sample came from someone who had eaten raw organs of an infected bovine.Advertisement
“We know they must have been eating internal organs such as the liver, where this parasite would normally live, and they were also feeding it to their dogs, because the dogs had the same kind of parasite,” says Mitchell.
The villagers probably ate raw, parasite-laden organs when a cow wasn’t cooked thoroughly. “We can see these beautiful parasite eggs from thousands of years ago, which haven’t been damaged by the cooking process,” says Mitchell.
One sample of dog excrement contained eggs from a freshwater fish tapeworm, which Mitchell says is an especially intriguing find because fish were not a common food at the settlement. He suspects the raw fish was transported from a faraway village for a feast at Stonehenge then consumed by the dog.
“[The results] show a really interesting way that humans were living with their companion animals thousands of years ago – they were still treating their dogs as one of the family even back then,” says Mitchell. “It’s given us this wonderful window of evidence that we didn’t have before.”
Journal reference: Parasitology, DOI: 10.1017/S0031182022000476

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Girls are just as capable as boys in science and mathematics, but ingrained attitudes are stopping female students from engaging, says Maria Rossini

Humans

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18 May 2022

By Maria Rossini
Simone Rotella
FROM Katherine Johnson, known for her pioneering work at NASA, to Nobel prizewinning physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, women have contributed hugely to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But that contribution often remains undervalued, and in the UK a false narrative persists that science is a boys’ subject and that girls lack the aptitude for study or work in STEM disciplines.
These long-standing negative assumptions were displayed recently at an inquiry on diversity in STEM by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee. Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in London and chair of the Social Mobility Commission, said that girls in her school have a “natural” aversion to physics and that it involves “hard maths”, which girls would “rather not do”.
Contrary to Birbalsingh’s comments, evidence shows that girls are just as capable as boys: girls outperform their male peers in GCSE maths and science qualifications, taken from age 14, with 68 per cent getting grades A*-C in 2015 versus 65 per cent for boys.Advertisement
Yet despite this, only around 23 per cent of entrants for the A level qualification in physics, taken from age 16, are girls. There are clearly underlying reasons behind these statistics, but Birbalsingh’s comments highlight exactly the kind of harmful stereotypes that have led many young women to disengage from these subjects.
Research has found that, despite being very capable, many girls lack proportionate confidence in their maths and physics abilities because they feel they aren’t “naturally” clever enough.
This is partly due to a notion within popular culture of the “effortlessly clever physicist” (whereby physics is presented as something that comes naturally, rather than something to work at), as well as the view that physics is “masculine and hard”: the very same troubling narrative that Birbalsingh was espousing.
It is also much harder for girls to aspire to STEM careers if there are no female role models for them to look up to in their studies. Representation of inspiring female scientists could be a crucial part of raising aspirations and dismantling harmful stereotypes. However, in an analysis of double science GCSE specifications from major exam boards, only Rosalind Franklin and Mary Leakey are mentioned. By contrast, 40 male scientists’ names can be found.
It is clear that the design of exam specifications, ingrained societal attitudes and potential gatekeeping practices in some of the UK’s schools need to be re- evaluated and addressed.
As research from Julie Moote at University College London has highlighted, greater support for teachers is needed so that they can better understand the complex and invisible ways in which gender, class and racial inequalities are reinforced through teaching.
Some studies also suggest that girls place a greater value on seeing the social relevance of the work they do, and engage better with a project-based approach to STEM. I can identify with this. Despite my A grades, I dropped physics and maths after GCSE. I later went on to be part of a team doing a physics-based project, where I had the opportunity to work on a real-life physics challenge. This sparked a new-found love of the subject, sadly too late to study it further.
If ingrained attitudes about science and misplaced cultural gender stereotypes lead to systemic barriers that dissuade girls from engaging, then, as a community, we need to examine our own attitudes and failings. It is time to call out opinions like Birbalsingh’s, and create a learning environment that actively breaks down stereotypes, in order to support girls and other under-represented groups to thrive in STEM subjects.
Maria Rossini is head of education at the British Science Association. @MariaTKRossini

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