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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 21 2016, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the dem-bones-dem-bones dept.

Researchers have found a skeleton on the Antikythera shipwreck and will attempt to extract DNA from it:

The researchers are on the tiny Greek island of Antikythera, a 10-minute boat ride from the wreckage of a 2,000-year-old merchant ship. Discovered by sponge divers in 1900, the wreck was the first ever investigated by archaeologists. Its most famous bounty to date has been a surprisingly sophisticated clockwork device that modelled the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets in the sky — dubbed the 'Antikythera mechanism'. But on 31 August this year, investigators made another groundbreaking discovery: a human skeleton, buried under around half a metre of pottery sherds and sand. "We're thrilled," says Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and co-director of the excavations team. "We don't know of anything else like it."

[...] The skeleton uncovered in August consists of a partial skull with three teeth, two arm bones, several rib pieces and two femurs, all apparently from the same person. Foley's team plans further excavations to see whether more bones are still under the sand. That so many individuals have been found at Antikythera — when most wrecks yield none — may be partly because few other wrecks have been as exhaustively investigated. But the researchers think it also reveals something about how the ship sank. This was a huge vessel for its time, perhaps more than 40 metres long, says Foley, with multiple decks and many people on board. The wreck is close to shore, at the foot of the island's steep cliffs. He concludes that a storm smashed the ship against the rocks so that it broke up and sank before people had a chance to react. "We think it was such a violent wrecking event, people got trapped below decks."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 21 2016, @02:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 21 2016, @02:24AM (#404630)

    Test the DNA for markers of homosexual pedophilia to be sure.