What would it be

[wayney]

Refering to Richard 111 documentary

 

If you could unearth someone from the past who would it be and why .

[Batman]

unearth? Does that mean this person will be alive again? If so someone of the great brains, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton, so that they could invent/discover new amazing things with our new technology! :cheesy:

[Empily]

I was watching that documentary with Reilly, I think we both where highly suspicious about the findings and how they weren't 100% sure whether the skeleton was female or male as it had features of both.

Also how the sciencey stuff and the accuracy of it was not properly explaned, they only showed the "bare bones" of the scientific findings and did not go into any details.

And the fact they only mentioned findings that supported their outcome. I would've liked to see the things which would've pointed towards it not being the skeleton of Richard the 3rd. I like unbiased documentaries :P

 

But in relation to the question, I would like to uncover skeletons of my own family haha because that way I'd feel some sort of conection to it. If it's a person I didn't know it kinda would just feel like another skeleton and it wouldn't feel real to me D:

That or the bones of Jesus because that would open a whole can of speculation and argument.

[Wyrd]

That male/female skeleton thing was indeed weird. But I just read that this happens a lot when they investigate old skeletons. I guess programs like Bones make it look as if it is that easy to determine the sex from the shape of the skeleton, but it is not. At least I got from an article about sex determination of skeletons ... or maybe King Richard had Klinefelter syndrome :laugh3: that would at least explain female-like properties of the skeleton. That poor guy, it would be sad if he really had Klinefelter and scoliosis.

 

Argh, I just wrote a whole piece on how unlikely it was to be so sure about a DNA match when there have been so many generations, etc. But then I read they used mitochondrial DNA of his sister and matched it with that of direct decendants in the maternal line. That's a powerful tool, because mitochondrial DNA is passed on directly from the mother which means that Richard had the same mitochondrial DNA as his sister and her daughters and their daughters too, etc, except for a bunch of mutations along the way.

 

But then my next problem is how they were able to isolate mitochondrial DNA from the skeleton, but still make a fuss about the feminin shape of the skeleton. It's really not that hard to do a DNA test to show that it's a male. Or did they manage to isolate mitochondrial DNA, but not nuclear DNA?

I want this to be published in a peer-review article, before that it's not evidence that this is Richard.

[Reilly]

It turns out we were right to be suspicious:

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/04/richard-iii-skeleton-bone-dna

 

At least it doesn't prove that it wasn't Richard, which is something.

 

It was funny at the end of the documentary when the presenter, who was clearly willing it on to be Richard III, used his forensic know-how to un-convincingly declare to a group of specialists that it was conclusively Richard after the DNA evidence, and they all looked at the floor and nodded along.

 

There was a Q&A afterwards with the woman in the program (Who believed shes an ancestor) and an archaeologist lady who worked behind the scenes on the program, but Channel 4 wouldn't submit our questions :'( (Though some of them were quite trollish) but basically when answering questions they kept answering at the same time and giving conflicting answers, haha. Someone's question about whether it was conclusive or not got through at the end, and at the same time the specialist said it wasn't 100% conclusive, at the same time the woman in the show said it was definitely 100%, then the specialist changed her answer to say all the points tie up. Not very convincing.

[Wyrd]

I am getting really confused now. How come that in one source they say they used the mother's mtDNA and in another they say they used the sister's mtDNA? And why does one source say they use mtDNA of a guy that is a direct descendant and another source says it's from two women?

 

Wait, apparently they used the sister's family tree to find a direct descendant. Then they found those women. Because this one woman died, they asked her son for a mtDNA sample to match this with the mtDNA of the skeleton.

 

I should stop reading into this .... okay, they base their mtDNA 'evidence' conclusion on the fact that the mtDNA is haplotype 'J'. No shit, 12% of the people in Europe have that haplotype ... How much of an evidence is that?