But a provocative new study published Thursday in Current Biology reveals that long-standing interpretations of these scenes are wrong.
The long-presumed family buried at one house turn out to be four unrelated males. And one of the two sisters locked in a hug turns out to be a male.
Video courtesy of Discovery Future
Scientists analyzed ancient DNA extracted from skeletal remains and pieced together fragments of five people’s identities, rewriting the romantic stories of who they were and how they were related.
Their ancestry could be traced, leading scientists to conclude that they were recent immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean or North Africa and offering more detail about migration at the time.
“It shows you how little is known about some of these events,” said David Reich, a geneticist who specializes in ancient DNA at Harvard University and one of the leaders of the study. “When you take this new scientific tool, you see things that are quite, quite different than reconstructions. It tells you the past is, as the cliché goes, an undiscovered country, and it’s really foreign and really different. Sometimes, what you think you see is not what it is.”
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