The Daily Populous Tuesday July 7th, 2026 morning edition
Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by PorcupineMerchant

PorcupineMerchant on July 6th, 2026 at 17:19 UTC »

Imagine huddling in a room while a volcano is erupting and all your neighbors are gathering up their valuables and fleeing. Now imagine one of the people in the room with you is a small baby in a wooden crib. For some reason, you stay put.

That’s exactly what happened in Herculaneum.

For those who aren’t familiar, Herculaneum was a city buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, just like Pompeii.

Well…not *just* like Pompeii, but we’ll get to that.

When this crib was found, it contained a small mattress stuffed with leaves, bits of cloth that were likely pieces of a woolen blanket, as well as the skeleton of a baby. Nearby were the skeletons of six adults.

The obvious question here is why didn’t they leave? We’ll likely never know for sure, but the situation in Herculaneum was quite a bit different from Pompeii.

Pompeii Vs. Herculaneum

In Pompeii, ash and rocks began falling almost instantly. The people knew something bad was happening. Most of the residents got away, but others either put it off too long, or simply couldn’t.

For example, we’ve found the remains of an extremely pregnant woman in Pompeii, who was surrounded by a few others. We can guess that she had difficulty moving around, so her family tried to wait things out with her.

We’ve also found the remains of numerous people who were trying to run, but didn’t leave early enough. Pliny the Younger, a guy who lived across the bay in Misenum, gives our only eyewitness account of those days. He said he and others were fleeing with pillows tied to their heads for protection.

And we’ve found some who were trying to get away while carrying pots or jars on their heads.

If you think of how things are these days, little has changed. You can warn people about a hurricane or a wildfire, and even those who are able-bodied enough to escape think they can just ride it out. Then you see them up on their roof getting rescued by a helicopter, clutching a dog who probably would’ve left days earlier if his owner wasn’t an idiot.

Unlike Pompeii, things in Herculaneum were completely calm. Certainly they could see what was coming out of Vesuvius, but the cloud was blowing away from them.

Collapsing Column

Eventually, the volcano’s column collapsed, sending what’s called a “pyroclastic flow” into Herculaneum. It wasn’t lava, but superheated gases, ash, and mud. We’re talking temperatures of nearly a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

We used to think virtually no one was killed at Herculaneum at all. But in the 1980s, hundreds of skeletons were found in the boathouses near the shoreline: People waiting for rescue. What hit them was so hot, it turned brains to glass (Yes, really).

Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum was buried almost instantly. So not only are the buildings better preserved due to the fact that they weren’t being pelted with rocks for hours, but the wood was left intact. It was instantly baked and buried, carbonizing it and sealing it off from the oxygen that would’ve caused it to burn.

So, we’re left with objects like this crib. Obviously it wasn’t found down near the boathouses with all the other people, but in what’s called the “House of M. Primigenius Granianus.” It’d once been a much larger house, later divided into three separate apartments.

For whatever reason, six people and one baby stayed inside. Maybe the baby was sick and they didn’t want to go. Maybe they thought everything would be fine, even though their neighbors were clearing out for hours. Maybe the baby’s mom was scared, and the family stayed with her.

Ancient Carpenters

Now, I don’t want to get too much into the actual construction of the crib itself, but it is worth mentioning that there wasn’t such a thing as just a generic “carpenter.”

Ancient Rome had guys who handled large wooden construction like roofs or scaffolding, guys who built carts and wagons, guys who made luxury wooden items, and so on.

It got *really* specific. There were classes of carpenters who made just beds, or just the legs of beds, or just boxes. They were all incredibly skilled, and often didn’t even use nails to join pieces of wood together.

Now, you might think you’ve seen wooden objects at Pompeii, but you probably didn’t. At places like the Villa of the Mysteries, you’ll see what look like doors, but they’re actually plaster casts of doors.

The wood rotted away because the burial was more porous. So there were holes allowing air to get in, and whatever wood wasn’t burned or destroyed eventually went the way of the bodies of the victims. Plaster was poured into these voids, and we’re left with casts of doors.

Incidentally — or not so incidentally, since obviously I have to give myself some sort of incentive for typing all this up, I made a video about the Villa of the Mysteries. It contains a room that was likely used as part of initiation rituals into a secret wine cult, so give it a watch if you’re into creepy wine cults and paintings of women being whipped by demons.

If you do happen to watch, my only request is that you open it in YouTube instead of opening it in the Reddit app. The Reddit app sucks and will probably lower the resolution. I didn’t carry a camera all the way to Italy so you could look at giant pixels!

Anyway, the crib is currently on display in the museum at Herculaneum, which is where I took this picture. They have a number of other wooden items there, as well as a lot of jewelry and other artifacts like tiny tweezers and hairpins and random bits you really can’t see anywhere else.

I’ll try to post some more if you guys are interested. Thanks!

Dapper-Finish-925 on July 6th, 2026 at 17:36 UTC »

Well this just made me sad. 😔 poor family.

churrmander on July 6th, 2026 at 17:38 UTC »

That's both really sad and incredibly fascinating.

I can't even begin to fathom the amount of fear you'd feel in a moment like that.