Richard III's remains....

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  • Dave The Ex- Spartan wrote (see)
    Screamapillar wrote (see)
     

    Interestingly, the actor Richard Armitage also has a pet project involving a drama series about Richard III that he's been working on for some time, so we could well be deluged with interesting stuff soon.

    Depends on your definition of interesting I suppose

     

    Mine's not the same as yours I suspect.

  • No it isn't. Dave likes caravans image

  • Did anyone catch the David Starkey prog Monarchy about Rich 3. Turns out all the apologists for him saying he is much maligned and not a nasty man after all, were a bit misled. He was a tyrant and killed whom so ever got in his way. 

    "But he killed those little boys" you cant apply modern morals, to the Medieval thinking.

    Interestingly they noted he got a dagger in the Ar$e image

  • No but I do know that Starkey is not a Ricardian so I'm not surprised by the content of the programme.

    I expect he conveniently skipped over the bits which prove his contemporaries actually behaved in much the same way  - Edward IV not only having Henry VI murdered but also his own brother for instance? Or the prisoners of war  Margaret of Anjou had executed after St. Albans, despite her husband ensuring their safety and her repeated assasination attempts against the Duke of York? 

    They were all at it. Richard was, at worst, no different. 

    The lesson of the Wars of the Roses was if that you didn't get rid of your rivals, a faction would gather around them who would come back with an army and fight you. In a sense Henry VII got lucky - once he came along there were very few people left alive with any real claim to the throne. Had Richard won at Bosworth his monarchy would probably have been secure. 

  • Yes hes not a fan but.I didnt really know much about Rich 3 so it sort of filled in some gaps about him and his brothers

    It seems anyone with the name Edward, Richard or Henry were tyrannincal. Interesting how the two side Ricardian and Tudor lovers cant seem to meet a common ground. Basically they were all ba$tards from ancient times to the end of the Victorias reign.History is always open to personal view point. I get the feeling he was just as nasty as all of them but was caught up in a Tudor spin machine

  • Trouble with being buried under a car park for a long-time is that they will tow you away,

    I see York have now pitched in saying he should be buried in the Minster and not Leicester Cathedral.

    Yorkists kicking off again. Plus ca change.

  • Yes, I agree with them too.

    At first I was OK with the Leicester thing and then I came to the conclusion that if you were going to give him a "multifaith" service AND bury him in a building that didn't exist at the time he was alive then you might as well put him back under the car park.

    At least York Minster is a building had a connection with in his lifetime. 

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  • Whose do you think they are then? Given that there's a DNA match?

  • he probably thinks they're related to the guys who say that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon

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  • Yes because that's what archaeologists do - lots of scientific testing just to make something up.

    Anyway, stop trolling and go and sell some blood.

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  • That might be true - but I'm guessing there are not thousands buried in the particular place where Richard III was said to be buried, who died of traumatic injury to the head, who had severe scoliosis, who are a genetic match for the living relative of Richard III

    Come on, it's him.  

  • A layman's intuition vs. an expert's "beyond reasonable doubt".

     

    Hmmm... tricky one!

  • Yeah and the parking place had R on it.



    I'm convinced.
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  • Colin - you said - A person who is alive now will be related to thousands of people who lived 500 years ago.



    Their DNA will presumably therefore "match" to some extent thousands of people who were alive 500 years ago.





    Isnt this the other way round ? I'm not a real archaeologist though.
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  • It is unfortunate that they decided to go for the TV route, rather than publishing the paper in a journal first, as it means people don't think it's "real" science. But, do you honestly think these eminent scientists, would have been happy putting their reputations on the line, on TV for the whole world to see, if they weren't sure? One of them refused to have Richard's standard laid over the box of bones they'd just dug up purely because they were uncertain at that point in time. Reputation is pretty much everything to a scientist, it governs who will work with you, who will employ you, your promotion prospects etc. Any data fraud in a case as high profile as this would result in lifetime unemployment in their chosen career.

    Regarding the DNA, you are right that standard DNA testing over so many generations would have resulted in many possible ancestors. However, there are other techniques rather than the standard DNA tests you are talking about, that they probably used. I think the most likely is analysis on DNA found in mitochondria, which is passed exclusively down from mother to child. I believe they were able to match this to the last surviving descendent of Richard's mother.

    Face reconstruction is more of an art than a science, and it is difficult to be objective when (famous) portraits exist, but I think it would have been revealing if they'd decided the skull could not support the face structure portrayed in his portraits.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_of_Richard_III_of_England

  • Colin - unfortunately your hypothesis about gene dilution over the years doesn't hold any scientific credence.

    the way ancestral DNA is analysed is to look at certain chromsomes - usually the Y chromosome which is male specific or mitochondrial DNA which is usually female specific. these carry regions of DNA that are carried down the generations - they are not diluted - and are relatively unique to an individual.  so you find a cluster of markers in the DNA being analysed (RIII in this case) and see if an ancestor with a known lineage (in this case RIII's descendant) matches. if so - bingo - you have a match.  the more markers you look at, the more certain the match. it's as simple as that. 

    to an extent you are right with the "hotpotch of DNA" - aka autosomal DNA that is shuffled about with each generation - but these are carried on other chromosomes (we have 23 pairs) and aren't analysed - only the sex-specific ones are as these rarely vary over generations.

     

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  • Didn't she say that before uncovering the very bent spine ? I thought they told us that ?
  • I thought so too Cougie - I'm pretty sure they explained that the reason the head was where it was, was because of the curvature of the spinal column.

    Either way, I do still remain sceptical about it too Colin - my thoughts regarding how many generations back they're trying to match are the same as yours.  Perhaps they now need to publish a paper with the exact science on it to back up the rather 'airy fairy' way they brushed over their statements in the programme. 

    Just a thought. image

  • Colin McLaughlin wrote (see)

    Could you apply this to the case in question please (if you will) and say something like:

    - It's definitely him beyond a shadow of a doubt, or

    - It may be him but it might also be 200/2000/20000 others related to the living relative.

    There must be maths on this, and probability.

    doing a bit of digging into this - so far they have only done mitochondrial DNA tests (which comes down the maternal line) and have found a match to two of RIII's sisters DNA - which for many is good enough but the comment "“rare enough to be interesting, but not rare enough to be conclusive.” has been made

    they now plan to study the Y-chromosome DNA (paternal line) and if that gives a good match against 4 living ancestors of RIII's great-great-grandfather (he had no male heirs so it has to be a known antecedent to work) then it will be conclusive proof as the 4 ancestors DNA matches precisely that of RIII's GGF.

    the maths of the probability of matches is beyond me I'm afraid - I'm a life scientist not a mathematician - but suffice it to say that if the Y tests give the same outcome as the mitochondrial tests then it will be conclusive proof.

     

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