They died together at Pompeii. Archaeologists got their stories wrong.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Those four weren’t a family. That pair wasn’t a mother and daughter.

And perhaps none of the other narratives meant to illuminate who perished together in the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius are correct—according to a new DNA analysis of their skeletal remains. When the residents of Pompeii died in a shower of hot ash and rocks erupting from Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the volcanic material enveloped them and their vibrant city in a pyroclastic shroud.

Archaeologists uncovering the singularly preserved site in the last centuries assembled stories about its residents, drawing clues from the jewelry they wore and the rooms and company in which they were found. But analyses of DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 14 Pompeii residents by an international team of scientists are challenging these theories. In one narrative, four people found in a richly decorated three-story home, dubbed the “House of the golden bracelet," were assumed to have been a family, including two children.

The heavy gold bangle on one of the individuals, believed to be the mother, gave the site its name. But the recent DNA analysis revealed that all of the residents were male, and three weren’t genetically related. The DNA of the fourth person was degraded too far to rule out a link through the paternal line.

“All we can say is that that particular scenario was not true," said Alissa Mittnik, a geneticist who works on ancient DNA at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and was part of the research team. The team’s results were published in the journal Current Biology in November. In the garden of another house, nine people died, two of whom perished in what looks like an