03 December 2014

It's Richard III - 99.999% certain

The Group at the University of Leicester and collaborators have now published a paper giving the evidence to show the skeleton found under a parking lot in the city in 2012 is King Richard III to a very high degree of certainty.
While the paper Identification of the remains of King Richard III published in Nature Communications is freely available, not behind a paywall, the easiest introduction to the work is the YouTube video Richard III – The DNA Analysis & Conclusion.
The work is important for its historical significance and also as a demonstration of the use of statistics in proving a genealogical case.  For the details of that look at the Supplemental Material, pages 47 - 52. BCG folks will perhaps shudder to see the phrase "weight of evidence" - twice.
While the paper emphasise the dominant significance of the mtDNA results in proving the case the other evidence alone is also compelling as shown in this blog post mentioned in the supplemental material.

1 comment:

Grandma Shirley said...

Thank you. That was interesting. I wish the closed caption had been better. They never did figure out the word mitochondrial. For us Yankees, the various British accents can be difficult to follow, and closed caption is really a big help.