POMPEII, Italy ( KMID/KPEJ) – A family frozen in time by the volcanic eruption that hit Pompeii nearly two millennia ago. It’s one of the many stories told by observers of the victims of the tragedy that struck the ancient town. But DNA evidence recently published in Current Biology suggests things were not as they seem.

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

In mere minutes, the giant cloud of ash and gases killed an estimated 2,000 people, many of whom were unearthed more than a thousand years later. Their decomposed bodies were preserved by the ash, and archaeologists were able to reconstruct their forms using plaster casts of the cavities they left behind. More than 100 casts have been made to date.