Richard III: Solving a 500 Year Old Cold Case | Dr Turi King | TEDxLeicester

right so I'm tree King and I'm going to be taking you on a bit of a whistle-stop journey through our journey which was solving a 500 year old cold case so Richard the third why is he so interesting well he was only King of England for two years from 1483 to 1485 and he was the last King of England to die in back when he died in the last vain battle of the Wars of the Roses the Battle of Bosworth which happened just outside of Leicester on the 22nd of August 1485 now the reason why his reign was so interesting was because with this battle it was the end of the Plantagenets entire era in British history and the mark of the Tudor period we know that when he was killed he was brought back into Leicester and he was laid out in a church for a couple of days presumably so people could see he was actually dead and then he was taken and buried in the choir of the Church of the gray friars in Leicester now 15:38 Henry the eighth's has a few domestic issues and you get the dissolution of the monasteries so this is where the precise location of Richard's grave starts to become lost there was even a rumor that his body had been dug up during the dissolution of the monasteries and thrown into the local River surahs attested by this plaque that's up by one of the bridges but there have been a lot of historical scholarship which has shown that this was very unlikely to be true so in 1920 you've got Bilson writing saying no the spray like these trees probably still in whatever is left of the grave fires in downtown Leicester you get the Richard the third Society writing about it and then you have the University of Lester's David Baldwin who writes a paper in 1986 he talks about how the remains of Richard the third probably lie somewhere whatever's left of the gray friars in downtown Leicester which is now covered by Carter parks and some buildings this has been taken up by the press in 1993 and then written about why Chuck called John ash down hill in his book and it's this book which inspired this lady up here this is Philippa Langley and she's from the Richard the third Society and what happened was way back in 2011 she started badgering us a little bit at the University of Leicester in Leicester City Council an all credit to her was her that actually got this project off the ground and University Richard the third Society Leicester City Council we all work together putting in money and staff time so this project could go to heck oh I had a really nice collaborative project but it's basically historical missing persons case isn't it so what are we actually looking for well we know he's supposed to be in the choir of the Church of the great friars he's aged 32 at the time of his death and we know that he died in battle so he's probably got battle injuries he's possibly a hunchback with a slight build and a little bit with a slight build and a lot of us can be laid at Shakespeare's door who calls him a bunch back toad and gives him a wither arm a gammy leg just for good measure but if you look at the contemporary sources so people who actually knew him you've got John routes who talks about him having unequal shoulders the right higher and the left lower and then you've got the lovely Nicholas Van Poppel who talks about how Richard is three fingers taller than him but then doesn't tell you how tall he is so you can't to work out how told Richard was little Tino how much we'd want to know this in 500 years time but talks about him having slender arms and thighs and also a great heart so going into the project we really had five main aims the first was can we actually find the Francisco fiery buildings if we can do that can we work out which bits we've actually found if we can do that can we find the church and more specifically the choir within the church and finally can we find the remains of rich the third and we attached a set of probabilities to these so as you see number five not realistically considered we never actually thought we would find richer the third little did we know we'd actually be number five before we did any of the rest of them so the site of the grave fryers precinct has never been lost there's actually things like this map from 1741 this is thomas roberts map and it's got the Greyfriars on it now it's thought the grave virus friary it's the land that was bought after the dissolution of the monasteries is later been developed and what you can do is something known as map regression and this gives us a search area so outlined in red we've got what we know is the friary precinct and the friary could be anywhere in here we don't know it could be in these car parks that are outlined in dark blue one here Social Services car park and one here or even tucked under these buildings which are the light blue so we've got about 17 percent of the friary precinct that we can actually dig in but we've only got the money to do one percent so when Richard Buckley is deciding where he's gonna put his trenches in he's been digging in the city for the last 30 years he knows that friary the main walls run east-west so if you do long thin trenches running north-south hopefully you'll cross some main walls and you'll start to be able to work out where you actually are and so that's how he's deciding where to put his trenches at that and you know try not to have sewage pipes and things like this the other thing that's interesting given what Richard the third is supposed to have done to his nephews is that we were actually in the social services carpark the one for child protection anyway so Richard Buckley he's decided where he's gonna put his trenches in and and he's got this strategy north/south and he's gonna try and miss the telephone cables and things like this and not because of this are did not mark the spot so there wasn't our in the car park we did spot it we're like oh hey we'll do it when we had a very 1 meter dillard test-fit we'll go straight down he'll be right underneath he wasn't he was basically where Karl vivianne our senior video producer was taking this picture so he was kind of like a little bit up here so being a half up but it's a nice story not quite under the arm so this is the 25th of August 2012 527 years to the day when Richard was buried and if you don't mind the calendar change that goes on in between but we're starting to put our trenches in and as you expect you start to find victory of these Victorian outbuildings and we find this little bit of leg bone this and so Matthew Morris our site director has a quick book because how do we know it's not just disarticulated little bit of bone and he has a quick feel and you realizes there's actually an articulated skeleton under there now what are you going to find in a friary site you're gonna find lots and lots of skeletons archaeologists do not go go digging up skeletons left right and center you have to get a license from the Ministry of Justice we're gonna lift up to six sets of remains and so what we do is we cover it up we're gonna make an educated decision about which six were actually going to excavate and we're gonna leave this one for the time being until we work out where we actually are but they're not very long we start to find bits like benches up against walls and from the sides of this room is starting to look like we might have found the chapter house and we find things like a medieval silver penny and in trench two it looks like we've come down on a cloister walk so at this point we're all extremely excited because we think we found the medieval friary little do we know we've actually already found Richard and he's just sitting over there waiting for us to come and get it so this is where we think we are we have got trench one here trench two there and we're looking for the church now the church can either be to the north or to the south you basically don't know until you put your Spade in the ground we want to put up the trenchant but we haven't got many places we can actually do it but we have got there we've got that grave and we've got a very very thick wall so it's decided we'll put in trench three on the other side of that wall in the older Minuten playground and tada pretty quickly it looks like we've come down on the church we've got very thick walls we've got what looks like two separate areas this looks like choir stall footing here so that looks like it's the choir going that way we find this great big stone coffin fortunately it was on the very last day or we probably would have thought that was Richard as it was it had a little old lady in it in in an alleged coffin so we called her lady and lead or Lil for short we found lots and lots of tomb lecturing and we tried to spell out Richard but we didn't have the right letters we found a silver Happiny from the time of Edward the fourth Sir Richard's elder brother and lots and lots of these heraldic Eagle patterning tiles which I now call the chicken of Leicester child so let's go back to skeleton one skeleton one start to look pretty interesting is looking like it's down at one end of the choir and this is you can actually see me and my daughter and Karl's over here I think this is what we came down I got a phone call saying come down we think we found a skeleton can I have a look at it as this rather portentous rain storm comes over the top and Matthew covers it up and then when we come to think watch it this is looking quite interesting this is Joe actually excavating and she's you know very very professional she's excavating away and she kind of sees injuries on the head and young Ishmael and she's kind of working from the outside in and she's trying to follow the spine up in a straight line from the pelvis up to the skull and what she's finding is that it goes off in a curve and she said the hair on the back of her neck went up as she realized what she was looking at and so she calls people over and she says look we better go get Richard Buckley we need to have people come and have a look at this so they come and have a look down into the trench and they see this apparently what Richard Buckley said is not repeatable so we have got a youngish male severe battle injuries severe scoliosis of the spine looks like somebody was in the grave to receive the body because the legs are nice and straight but the grave is bath shape that's not not got 93 sauna it's like it should do so it's like this in a very high-status part of the church but they've done it in a bit of a hurry which is why his head is in up in a bit of an unusual position he had a lot of wounds on him he had eleven wounds nine of which were around the head so for example he's got this one here on the very top of his head and we've got a forensic engineer Sarah Hainsworth who did micro CT scans and you can see it's not gone all the way through it wouldn't have killed him but it would have made him feel rather woozy now this is the base of his skull and we do have a hole in the base of our skulls where the spinal column goes up but he has got these two socking great wounds either of these would have killed him but we don't know which came first because they don't overlain one another but this one here exposed seven inches of brain this one here you can actually see where it's nicked the top of his spinal column gone through this hole and you can actually see where it's hit on the inside the skull on the other side either one of those two would have killed them but we don't know which came first so there's so far is looking pretty darn good we have got a youngish male in the choir the Church of the gray friars the skalise evidence looks good radiocarbon dates come back right 1450 to 1540 so nicely bracketing when Richard was killed stable isotope data is showing that he's got a high status diet so that's looking great now obviously in this day and age you can add DNA evidence to the pot but the DNA and this DNA analysis is completely reliant on the genealogical research on its own I'm just looking on the DNA it doesn't tell me who it is I need to have a relative to compare the DNA to now Richard had no known living descendants so are there any relatives kicking around well actually I can tell you we're all related to Richard the third but you wouldn't believe the number of people who contact me and tell me I think I'm related to Richard the third isn't we're all related to Richard the third but for the genetic analysis I mean so Anna st. Richard is critics suggested that there are between 117 million people who are alive today who are descendants of Richard's immediate family and I think most of them have emailed me by now but actually for genetic analysis you cannot use just any old piece of DNA and that's because the vast majority of our DNA is a very very complex mixture of that of our ancestor and I can't use it for this sort of identification purposes I need to use two pieces of DNA that are passed down through the generations in a very simple way days are mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome so let's have a look at these Y chromosome has on it the gene which essentially determines maleness so only men have it and they will pass it down to their sons down through the generations so if I can point somebody who's related to Richard through the male mind I can look at their Y chromosome type see if it matches the skeleton mitochondrial DNA small circular piece of DNA it's in the egg so it's passed down by a mum to all of our children but only daughters can pass it on so again if I can find somebody who's alive today who is related to reach it through the female line you can have boys at either end to that chain as long as it's girls all the way through I can look at their mitochondrial DNA see if it matches the skeletal remains now we already knew about one of these people before the project even started this is Michael imps inand he's Canadian like me and I met him for the very first day of the day on in the car park where I sort of sign all that today would you give me a DNA sample you know like I do when I meet men you know now Tod knew he was related to Richard and that's because this part of his tree down to here was already known in a number of sources the most recent being published in 1907 but what this chap did John Ashe down hill and others managed to trace down this last little bit 10 to joy Epson who dad sadly died a few years ago but Michael was living in London quite happy to give a DNA sample now the problem was is that this tree there was no documentary evidence to prove that it was correct and that was really important for my work so what Kevin sure did he was our Pro VC for research at the time but also a professor in English local history he and his team dug out every single piece of documentary evidence to prove that tree was correct and also found somebody else a lady called Wendy dull dick the irony of her surname because it was anything but a dull dig that we've been on but here she is here now she and Michael are 14th cousins twice removed through the female line so they should have identical or near identical mitochondrial DNA type and if that skeleton is rich the third that's the mitochondrial DNA type but I'm looking for it in that skeleton male line again pretty straightforward to go to Burke's peerage and what you realize is that you have to go up to Edmund Richards great-granddad across to Edward the third and then down through John of Gaunt's line till you get to Henry Somerset the fifth Duke of Beaufort and what Kevin did was he found five descendants of Henry and made sure that they didn't know that they were they weren't closely related to one another now because this is male 9 these guys should all have the same Y chromosome type as each other and should have the same Y chromosome type as Richard except for one tiny wee possible it'll probably which I knew about for my previous research and that is that the Y chromosome that a man carries is from his biological father who may not be the father that he thinks it is so if there's been any medieval hanky-panky in here if I medieval milkman has come on the scene then there will not be a Y chromosome match and actually we knew about two cases where people where children were born illegitimately so out of wedlock and later legitimize but if there's anything else going on then there won't be a y-chromosome match doing modern DNA very very straightforward I just need to get a DNA sample cheek sample anything like that that's completely fine and I can do the DNA analysis anywhere I like and it was done here at the University of Leicester ancient DNA is a completely different kettle of fish our DNA after death is starting to degrade tinier and tinier fragments shorter and shorter little fragments all you need to do is breathe on the remains and you're dumping huge amounts of your nice healthy DNA and it's gonna swamp out any signal of the ancient DNA so this is joe and i and we're excavating and our rather sexy CSI gear with face masks and all this sort of stuff and this is me doing the work in one of the labs what I had to do was because we don't have an ancient DNA lab here at Leicester I had to go and do the work in two separate labs to make sure you're getting the same results in two different labs and I did that with Patricia Bella resk at the University called Sebastian use and with Mickey Hoff Ryder who's a bit of a heartthrob in the ancient DNA world but it's not why I chose his lab is actually one of the biggest names and he was up at the University of York at the time which was ironic given all the hoo-ha that was going about about where Richard should be reburied but anyways now I'm not going to show you the y-chromosome data cuz we don't have time but this is the mitochondrial DNA and as part of the mitochondrial DNA sequence from Michael Ibsen it's not everything I did but it's to kind of give you an idea as to what it looks like and what you're interested in is not the heights of these Peaks but in the sequence of those four different colors because the four different colors represent the four different building blocks of DNA so that's Michael and that's Wendy lovely great match between them that was quite a big moment for me and then this is the same sequence from skeleton one from the Greyfriars site again it doesn't show you all the work that goes into this because you have to kind of put all the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle but again on top of everything else the DNA evidence as well as quantity as being the remains of Richard the third the one thing we want to do was a Bayesian statistical analysis this is essentially what they do in forensic cases where you basically take all of the strands of evidence together this is a missing person case how likely is it that you're going to find someone whose remains are found in the choir that church the gray friars where richard was last seen and they match all of the strands of evidence that we know about him purely by chance it's not actually Richard it's somebody purely by chance so you have to ask yourself how likely are you gonna find a male age 30 to 34 and have multiple battle injuries and have scoliosis and so on right radiocarbon dates stable isotope analysis showed he had high status but then he's in a high stage part of the church so that's this circular so we can use that Y chromosome didn't match but we know about Paul's paternity rates you just put that in my laundry all DNA match and no hits in any of the European databases that we looked at so if you do that calculation and you go what's the likelihood of this being not being Richard it's somebody purely by chance it's 6.7 million to one that translates to 99.999 to 99.99999% but these are the remains of Richard so the evidence is overwhelming that these are the reigns of Richard the third which is just as well because he's now in the Cathedral and Rockland great stereo so he's been found when this project started way back in 2011 and I was contacted they said don't worry it'll be half a day of your time you can come in who knew they knew I've done archaeology as my background and I did genetics now come on you can come on the dig don't worry we'll never find rich it'll be half a day of your time if we find Richard the third I'll eat my hat this is what Richard Buckley kept saying all through the dig if they find Richard the third I'll eat my hat so at the end of the dig there were some little cake hats made and this is Richard Dooley eating you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 64,315

Rating: 4.8482385 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Science (hard), Archeaology, Cells, Civil War, Data, Genetics, Identity, Innovation, Science, Technology

Id: oyE9sVs_s58

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2016