Pompei, capsula del tempo dell'Impero Romano: analisi paleogenomica dei resti umani rinvenuti nell'antica città

The ancient city of Pompeii has a worldwide interest for its unique history, so that it is included in the UNESCO World Heritage. It represents a time capsule of Roman antiquity because buildings, monuments, sculptures, paintings and mosaics were preserved and remained intact, as well as food and personal objects related with daily life. Many human remains, belonging to people who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, have been unearthed thanks to the intense excavations of the archaeological site. Bone microstructures seem to be well preserved under 5-6 meters of pyroclastic materials, which also slowed down the DNA degradation process due to oxidative decay. Indeed, a first shallow shotgun sequencing of more than 170 human remains (mostly bones and in some cases even teeth) demonstrated a good preservation of ancient DNA (aDNA), exceeding even 90% in a few cases. This is the first time that a great number of individuals who lived or were in Pompeii for other reasons at the time of the eruption are studied from a population genomic perspective. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we studied human remains found in the same archaeological context, the so-called “Stanza degli Scheletri”. We were able to identify the minimum number of individuals who found shelter inside the room and a first-degree relationship between two of them. In addition, we observed high genomic variability even when studying a small sample of the population. Moreover, twelve genomic libraries with a good percentage of endogenous DNA preservation (>20%) were selected to perform a deep shotgun sequencing with the aim to obtain an average coverage of 1x. We used a whole-genome approach to analyse the genomic variability of individuals found in Pompei and to make comparisons between them and other ancient Eurasian populations published so far. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Admixture demonstrate the presence of an heterogeneous populations. In Pompeii we found genetic variants already observed in pre-Roman Italic populations and in coeval individuals from different parts of Europe. These results are supported by historical documents and archaeological findings that show Pompeii as one of the most active commercial and port cities of the Mediterranean.