Thread by @DrKillgrove

Studying ancient skeletons has always been a little -- well, more than a little -- weird. But I've recently started adding DNA to my work, and one result in particular has kind of freaked me out (for lack of a better term) this week. [1/10]

In the work I've been doing on the Oplontis skeletons (Italy, 79 AD), I've been trying to use mtDNA haplotypes to figure out biological relationships among the 64 people who all died in the same room due to the eruption of Mt Vesuvius. [2/10]

My hypothesis going in was that they were maybe a few extended families, sheltering together. So I've been looking for concordances that would suggest close maternal relationships like mother/child, aunt/nephew, cousins, etc. [3/10]

I realized the other day that one particular skeleton -- that of a near-term fetus, found in its mother's pelvic cavity -- had been well preserved enough to provide biological sex information. [4/10]

madeinpompei.it/2017/08/08/ecc…

In bioarch, we don't estimate sex for prepubertal individuals, as the skeleton isn't dimorphic enough (at least not for standard techniques; there are new techniques being created all the time that I'm not up on). So I've never before had bio sex info for folks this young. [5/10]

More importantly, though, I realized that all the techniques I've used to date are ways of "asking" past people what they already knew: their biological sex, their age-at-death, what they ate, where they came from, whom they were related to... [6/10]

But now, for the first time in my work, I got information that no one else ever knew when they were alive two millennia ago:

I learned the sex of a woman's unborn child. [7/10]

And... perhaps because I've been that woman, wondering what was happening to the growing fetus inside of me, I've been mulling over this information for days now, unsure of what to do with it. [8/10]

Would this woman have wondered whether she was having a boy or a girl? Did it matter to her? What was she most concerned about as Vesuvius roared to life, raining ash and pumice over the entire Bay of Naples? [9/10]

I have no conclusions or pronouncements, just thought I'd share a bit of a shift in the way that I now think of ancient human skeletal remains because of the use of the new (to me) technique of ancient DNA analysis. [10/10]

Since this seems to resonate a bit with folks, here's a link to my project website, which has 3D models you can investigate. Hoping to publish the collection of skeletal data early next year!

facesofoplontis.com