In 2012, a team of scientists unearthed a skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester. Were they the remains of the legendary King Richard III, who was killed on the battlefield in 1485? It kept genetics Turi King busy for years, but she's out. In the fifth Hoboken lecture in the Natural History Museum Rotterdam she talked about her exciting quest.
“We can't find him anyway. It will only take you half a day.” That's what archaeologist Richard Buckley told Turi King in 2011 when he asked her to accompany her to the site where the church of the Franciscan monastery Greyfriars once stood. But on the first day, after a few hours of digging, she had found him:the famous English King Richard III.
This last king of the Plantagenet family died on the battlefield in 1485. After receiving just about every wound imaginable, he was hung naked over his horse and exposed to the people. A few days later he was buried in the church of the Franciscan monastery Greyfriars in Leicester. When many monasteries were demolished years later on the orders of King Henry VIII, the site of King Richard III's tomb was lost.
Richardfan
“After the monastery was demolished, his remains were rumored to have been thrown into the river he drove over as he headed for the battlefield,” said Turi King during her sold-out Hoboken lecture. But others said he was left in the city in the ground under the former church. One of them was Scottish writer and King Richard III fan Philippa Langley. She lobbied the city council and the university until she convinced everyone to look for her idol.
And so it happened that one rainy day in 2012, Turi King saw a piece of leg bone emerge from under a parking lot. At first she ignored it, because she wanted to make sure she was in the right location. “We didn't even know at the time whether we were digging inside or outside the former church.” After a week it turned out that the place where they dug the first day was the sanctuary of the church. Exactly the place where according to the history books Richard was once buried.
Deepest secret
Once the skeleton was above ground, King and her team spent months working on their investigation in top secrecy. The whole town wondered if it was him. "I didn't even tell my husband and children because other parents let their children ask my children if they knew anything." King first examined whether it was a man or a woman. It turned out to be a man. One with severe scoliosis (curvature of the spine so that one shoulder is always higher than the other) and severe injuries to his limbs and head. “He has three injuries on top of his skull. We know from 3D scans that two of them were made with the same sword. One of them goes into the bottom of the skull. That could have been the death blow.”
In the video above, investigator Jo Appleby talks about the investigation into King Richard III's injuries.
Fish makes you old
The next step was radiocarbon dating. “An important detail was that we knew from the books that Richard was an avid fish eater. You have to take that into account in your dating, because that strongly influences the results. The carbon cycle of a fish diet is longer. A fish eats plankton. Fish eats fish and that fish also eats fish. And then we eat that fish. As a result, your parent will pass the test.” It was eventually dated to 1456-1530. And that's where the year of death came in nicely.
So far, the evidence has been convincing. But as a geneticist, King naturally also wanted to examine the DNA that she had extracted from Richard's tooth. For that, she needed a direct descendant. DNA research can be done via the Y chromosome which is passed on through the male line or via Mitochondrial DNA which is passed on through the maternal line. “You don't want to know how many people have written to me that they would like to give up a piece of themselves because they were sure that they were related to him. I even received an envelope that had clearly been very wet with a cotton swab with cheek mucus in it.”
Medieval milkmen
Through genealogical research, King and her colleagues discovered that five more descendants had to live in the male line. “Unfortunately, they fell off quickly, because most likely a number of medieval milkmen stopped by. The y chromosome is passed on through the biological father and that is not always the man you think is your father.” None of the five men matched Richard in DNA. Along the female line, King was luckier. The team tracked down two descendants:Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig.
“After death, the DNA disintegrates, so you are left with all kinds of loose fragments. But the first fragments of Ibsen and Duldig that I placed next to Richard's DNA already matched." She ran the same experiments again in another lab and was out. This is him! “Because how often do you find a man's body in a church, how often do you find someone with scoliosis, how many dead have war injuries? If you combine the probability of these things, you get a 6.7 million to 1 probability. The probability that we found him is 99.9999 percent.”
The scientists even managed to reconstruct what he probably sounded like:
All of Richard's remains were reburied in March of this year, including the samples that King took for her research. King himself was there too. “That was a nice end to our work. In the end, he was in our care longer than he was king.” The latest analyzes of the samples performs them now. For example, she is working on mapping his entire genome and looking at what information she can extract from his tartar. "You can deduce from that what kind of infections he had and what he ate." She is not thinking about a new excavation for the time being. “We will not soon have as much luck as within this project.”