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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the life-finds-a-way dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

DNA from medieval Crusader skeletons suggests surprising diversity

European soldiers and civilians poured into the Levant in the 12th and 13th centuries, often killing or displacing local Muslim populations and establishing their own settlements in an effort to seize control of sites sacred to three major religious groups.

But in a new study, DNA from the skeletons of nine soldiers hints that the armies of the Crusades were more diverse and more closely linked with local people in Lebanon than historians previously assumed. The genetic evidence suggests that the Crusaders also recruited from among local populations, and European soldiers sometimes married local women and raised children, some of whom may have grown up to fight in later campaigns.

For centuries, the mingled, charred bones of at least 25 soldiers lay buried in two mass graves near the ruins of the Castle of St. Louis, a 12th- to 13th-century Crusader stronghold near Sidon, in south Lebanon. Several of the skeletons (all apparently male) bore the marks of violent death, and the artifacts mingled with the bones—buckles of medieval European design, along with a coin minted in Italy in 1245 to commemorate the Crusades—mark the pit's occupants as dead Crusader soldiers, burned and buried in the aftermath of a battle. From nine of them, geneticist Marc Haber and his colleagues at the Wellcome Sanger Institute obtained usable DNA sequences, which offer a rare look into the ranks of the soldiers who fought on one side of the 200-year series of wars.

The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/10.1016/j.ajhg.2019.03.015


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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:43AM (2 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:43AM (#834207)

    I'm sure you're right about dead soldiers being buried together, but there were many Christians living in the Middle East and I'm sure many of the young men would have been keen to join up to fight, even if out of a sense of adventure. Young men have always been like that.

    Many of the crusading armies were also poorly supported and supplied, so I imagine any reinforcements would have been very welcome.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @07:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @07:38AM (#834253)

    I'm sure you're right about dead soldiers being buried together,

    Let us not jump to hasty conclusions based on Runaway's shipboard experiences.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @08:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @08:20AM (#834261)

    Young men have always been like that.

    Nothing like Millennial Incels.