Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Richard 111

Isn't this an amazing discovery? I was especially interested in the identification of the man (whose name I forget!) being able to provide DNA to conclude that this body was in fact, without doubt, Richard himself.

The body itself was obviously conforming to all the details known about Richard, including the quite severe scoliosis that the spine showed clearly, so it would not really need the DNA. However it does provide the final proof I suppose.

What will happen to the bones now? I hope they won't go on display! Yuck!

Well, there seems to be some fairly good evidence that it was Richard, but I don't consider the DNA as hugely important. It shows a possibility that it was Richard III, but I realize that in addition to Richard the man had a lot of other relatives from that time. In fact at that ancestral distance the body could have been almost any body in England and still be related to him. So I will say well done, but I won't go as far as accepting that they have absolute proof that it is the body of Richard III.

Bill Gill

"It’s kind of the 15th century’s Higgs Bosun moment.”

http://www.nature.com/news/body-of-evidence-1.12362

Well he was the King of England (even tho he was unpopular)
Remember he was buried in a the local and wonderful Oak
Baronial Hall of its time. (A great honour for the locals?)

And...just who was going to take his body by Coach and horses back to London in times of War???

The hall has long rotted away, but its area was left, forgotten, for hundreds of years to become a Car Park.

Actually Mike-Richard lll was not hated in his local area. He was regarded as a fair and considerate administrator in his own duchy. The tales of him being literally a monster were put about by his successors and the winners! They had rather a shaky claim to the throne and various other claimants were disposed of in the ensuing years.

When Shakespeare wrote his play (Richard lll) it was in his own interest in EVERY way to make him a monster, as Elizabeth l was a descendant of the Henry Tudor, and many still disputed her claim to the throne for many reasons, as well as this one, during her lifetime.

This is not correct. The DNA they used to determine his ancestry was mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). mtDNA is passed exclusively mother->child (i.e. fathers do not pass theirs onto their children) and does not undergo recombination (so it doesn't get mixed up generation-to-generation). As such, the extent to which is spreads throughout a population is much less than the extent genomic DNA spreads.

Is it bullet-proof? Of course not. But given the comparator sample was from an individual known to be descended from the king via a maternal line, given the age/location of the skeleton, and given the skeleton had physical traits consistent with the king and his known cause of death, its a pretty strong piece of evidence. The only other possibility would be a cousin/brother, with the same skeletal deformities, who died in a battle at about the same time.

Bryan