Here’s an article which questions the strength of the mt-DNA analysis, suggesting that it’s not that significant unless the strand shared by the bones and Mr Ibsen is an unusual one:
However, the article doesn’t note that there was a match with another matrilineal descendant of Richard III’s mother. It seems that having the mt-DNA match with two known descendants increases the strength of the conclusion: one could be a coincidence, but two? Could a real geneticist chime in on this point?
My understanding is that the need for two living relations is to guard against the chance that one of them is simply wrong about their family history. (The University of Leister posted one of the family trees, which I thought was pretty cool.)
But Richard III’s maternal line went back in England at least four generations (according to wikipedia, to a Flemish knight whose wife is unknown*) so there were probably a decent number of other aristocrats running around during the period with the same mtDNA. If it weren’t for the other evidence, I don’t think DNA on its own would be more then suggestive.
*but who was also the MIL of Chaucer. Small world.
I think the mtDNA analysis must be simply supporting evidence, and not definitive. There must be tens of thousands of people with the same mtDNA in England.
Well, it doesn’t matter how many people there are now with the same mtDNA, it matters how many there were in 1485.
Conceivably Richard III’s Great^4 Grandmother was a Flemish woman whose mtDNA may not have been widespread in England before she followed her Flemish husband over when he crossed the Channel, in which case there would only be a few dozen individuals with the same mtDNA in England in 1485, making the chances of a false match pretty miniscule. And even better, you could probably individually rule most of them out as possibly being the body under the Church, since most of their deaths are documented.
But sadly there doesn’t seem to be any record of the woman, so the aforementioned Flemish knight may have just married an Englishwoman whose mtDNA was already well represented in the English aristocracy.
WILLIAM I the Conqueror (House of Normandy)
s. HENRY I
dau. Matilda m. Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duc d’Anjou
s; HENRY II *House of Plantagenet, or Angevins)
s. JOHN
s. HENRY III
s. EDWARD I
s. EDWARD II
s. EDWARD III A long and complex series of events leads to the reugns of first the House of Lancaster and then the House of York, both being male-line cadet branches of the Plantagenets. Our line of interest leads to a man who is Edward III’s great-grandson on both his father’s and his mother’s side:
Richard, Duke of York
s. EDWARD IV
d. Elizabeth m. HENRY VII (House of Tudor), heir of line to Lancastrians.
d. Margaret m. James IV, King of Scots (House of Stuart(
s. James V, King of Scots
d. Mary Queen of Scots
s. JAMES VI of Scots and I of England
d. Elizabeth, Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia
d/ Sophia , Duchess of Brunswick and Electress of Hanover (House of Hanover)
s. GEORGE I
s. GEORGE II
s. Frederick, Prince of Wales
s. GEORGE III
s. Edward, Duke of Kent
d. VICTORIA
s. EDWARD VII *House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha)
s. GEORGE V (changed house name to Wundsor in 1917)
s. GEORGE VI
d. ELIZABETH II
So yeah, they are descended from the Plantagenets and the Hanovers, and the first kings of both Tudor and English Stuart lines as well, albeit through several female lines.
I’d be a whole lot more impressed if the facial reconstruction artist had no idea whose skull they were reconstructing and/or had never seen Richard III’s portraits. But I bet they did/had.
All of which was discussed in great detail by David Baldwin in an article from 1986, which, prior to the excavations, was the standard work on the subject. Baldwin’s article now seems extraordinarily prescient.
My understanding is that the process is automated; the computer just adds whatever level of flesh is average for the person’s gender/age/race/etc. Obviously people decide on the hairstyle, colouring, etc, but the actual face is dictated by the bones and the computer is just filling in the blanks. So, no, it’s not people drawing it in Photoshop.
Anyone should be able to see that the skull in question has a prominent chin that is very similar, even without adding any computer-generated flesh, to the portraits of Richard III. You don’t have to use much imagination to see that it matches.
On the reconstruction? The lips look similar on the portraits and the computer reconstruction, it’s true. Do lips leave any tell-tale traces on the bones as to whether they’re thick or thin? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t just assume that they don’t.
The skull looks extremely jut-jawed to the point of having an underbite. I imagine most Europeans with that kind of facial construction would tend to be thin-lipped.
Unlikely. There aren’t that many mtDNA groups in all of Europe, and we don’t have any way of knowing how widespread this particular DNA group was in England in the 15th century. It might be able to to be used to rule out that the skeleton was R III, but by itself it is only suggestive, not conclusive.