In the ruins of Pompeii, visitors aren’t only able to see the houses, frescos and artifacts of the ancient city’s people. They can also “see” the people themselves: plaster casts of Pompeii citizens’ burned bodies,

The findings, which used DNA from the plaster casts of people who died in the Mt. Vesuvius eruption two millennia ago, challenge the traditional gender and familial assumptions about the Pompeiians.

New DNA analysis of skeletal remains from Pompeii reveals that victims of Vesuvius’s eruption have been wrongly identified.