When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its citizens were preserved in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories in the casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they die.

But new DNA evidence suggests that things were not as they seem – and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives based on how these individuals were somehow found in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It opens up different interpretations of who these people could have been.”

Mittnik and her colleagues found that the person thought to be a mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people locked in an embrace — long assumed to be sisters or a mother and daughter — was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The team, which also includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two millennia. After Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the Roman city in AD 79, the bodies buried in the mud and ash eventually decomposed, leaving spaces where they once were. Patterns were created from blanks in the late 1800s.

The researchers focused on 14 casts being restored, extracting DNA from the fragmented skeletal remains that were mixed in with them. They hoped to determine the sex, parentage and genetic relationships of the victims.

There were more surprises in the “house of gold bracelets”, the home where the mother and child were allegedly found. The adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry, for which the house was named, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and a child believed to be the rest of their nuclear family.

DNA evidence showed that the four were men and were not related to each other, clearly showing that “the story that has been swirling around these individuals for a long time” was wrong, Mittnik said.

The researchers also confirmed that the citizens of Pompeii came from diverse backgrounds, but were mainly descended from immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean—underscoring a broad pattern of cultural movement and exchange within the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located approximately 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Rome.

The study builds on research from 2022, when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time and confirmed the possibility of extracting ancient DNA from human remains that still exist.

“They have a better overview of what’s going on in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that research who was not involved in the current study. “Actually, I had one. genome, a sample, a shot.”

While much remains to be learned, Scorrano said, such genetic hits are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past.