Richard III: The DNA Analysis and Conclusion - Professor Turi King

Video Description

https://turiking.co.uk/ Podcast: The genetic analysis of King Richard III https://youtu.be/lZ56Cwa_V9o The identification of the remains of King Richard III can be thought of as a historical missing person’s case. Richard III last seen, according to historical records, in the choir of the church of the Grey Friars Friary, in Leicester. However, since that time, the Friary had been torn down during the dissolution of the monasteries. The excavation that we carried out in 2012 was to first see if we could find what if anything was left of the friary and then from that hopefully home in on the area where he could be. In terms of what we were looking for: we knew Richard was aged 32, in 1485, when he died in battle. And, from looking at the historical sources, he may have had a spinal abnormality. We carry out the excavation and find the skeletal remains of somebody that looks like it could be him. All of the information from the analysis of the bones is consistent with these being the remains of Richard III. So how does the DNA analysis figure into this case. Well, just as in any missing person’s case, you compare the DNA of the person you’ve found with that of a known relative. It's important to remember that Richard has no known living descendants, so any present-day living relatives are descendances of Richard's own relatives, not Richard himself. And it’s important to say here that not just any old relative would do for the DNA analysis. The DNA we inherit is a complex mixture of just some of our many, many ancestors. Given the number of generations since Richard III was alive, I had to concentrate on looking at parts of our DNA that’s passed down through the generations in a really simple way. I was particularly interested in analysing three different segments of DNA from the skeleton as part of this project. So, the first of these was mitochondrial DNA. Now mitochondrial DNA was interesting for the project for two reasons: first of all, it's in lots and lots of copies in each of our cells, so if you're going to find any DNA left in skeletal remains it tends to be mitochondrial DNA. The second reason why it's really useful for this case is it’s passed down just through the female line, so mum passes it down to all of her children - boys and girls - but only daughters can pass it on. So, it means that if I can find a female line relative of Richard, and it can be a boy or a girl, so long as it's all female line all the way through the rest of that line, I can use them to act as a comparator. I can look at the mitochondrial DNA of the living relative and see if it matches those of the remains. The next segment of DNA I was interested in was the Y chromosome. So, the Y chromosome also has a very simple pattern of inheritance - it is passed down only through the male line, so all men related through the male line should have an identical or near identical Y chromosome types. The third bits of DNA that I was interested in are sections of our DNA that can help predict a person’s hair and eye colour. And the reason why that is interesting is because there are no contemporary portraits of Richard. So, what I was interested in doing was looking at what the DNA was predicting about his hair and eye colour and then comparing that against the portraits that we’ve got and seeing which is the closest match. So how to find those relatives to compare the DNA to. Well, one of them was already known: Michael Ibsen. He is a female-line relative of King Richard III. We had to be certain that the genealogy was correct, it’s vital to know how a relative is related to the missing person and be certain of that. This is because if there wasn’t a DNA match, how do we know that it isn’t just because the genealogy was wrong. This entailed Professor Kevin Schürer and his team looking at a range of documents including sources such as centuries-old wills, as well as marriage and birth records. Together they helped reconstruct family trees and give documentary proof, as far as you can obtain it, that the family tree is correct. It also allowed us to trace another female line relative, distantly related to Michael but also descended from Anne of York. This was a woman called Wendy Duldig, who, thankfully, also agreed to take part in this research. Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig are 14th cousins twice removed. They are both descended from Anne of York who is Richard's eldest sister, and they share the same common ancestors for a couple of generations and then they split off and it's all female line as you'd expect down through the generations until you get to the both of them. I was able to take DNA samples from them and look at their mitochondrial DNA. First and foremost, they matched each other, which meant that the family tree linking them was correct and then they matched the skeletal remains, which again showed that the DNA evidence, as well, was pointing to these being the remains of Richard III.