Ancient DNA Secrets

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

And this week, we are going to find out if I am the rightful heir to the throne of England.

Elaborate.

Elaborate, Your Royal Highness, I think you'll find.

No, it's true, actually.

So, in researching for this programme, Robin brought a family tree out, and he does say that he's related directly to Edward III,

who's the, I think, the one who had the poker shoved up.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, the bayonet work was Edward II.

There is no abuse of fire irons in my particular that part of my lineage.

Actually, it does say that it says Edward III and his wife Philippa had eight sons and five daughters, and therefore it is true.

And I quote that there is not a person with predominantly British ancestry that will not be descended from Edward III.

But, like we said, it really is.

There's the proper line all the way down, and that also means that I am a direct descendant of Lionel of Antwerp, who is either the son of a king or a highly paid hairdresser in Belgium.

He's one or the other.

I know him.

I know you know Lionel of Antwerp.

You always pop in there before you do a lecture in Bruges, Bruges, don't you?

Oh, do something with this, it's just so flat and lifeless.

Thank you, Lionel.

Remarkably, though, for once, this introduction is actually relevant to the show.

Because today's show is about the famous case of the identification of the remains of King Richard III using ancient DNA evidence.

How do we isolate genetic material from 500-year-old bones?

How does that allow us to trace a family tree back over half a millennium to a collection of remains under a Leicester car park?

And what might the future hold?

For car parks?

Revelations about human history and car parks as well.

Today, we are coming from the France's Crick Institute, and we are joined by the head of the Crick Institute, who is also a Nobel Prize winner, a genetic genealogist, a horrible historian, and someone who's got a mysterious box of bones.

And they are Paul Nurse, that's me.

And the historical figure whose DNA sequence I would most like to know is God.

The problem is, I'm not sure if we should think God as an historical figure or more a celestial being.

So, given that, I'm going to choose Patrick Moore.

Patrick Moore

first turned me on to science when I was nine years of age and sat at his feet, a member of the Junior Astronomical Society.

And he spoke about the moon to exactly 11 people in the room, a front room in Eastern.

Thank you very much for all of that, Patrick.

Hello, I'm Tom Booth.

I'm a senior research scientist in the Ancient Genomics Lab at the Francis Crick Institute.

And the historical figure whose genome I would most like to sequence is Barry Gibb, because then I could show off my B genomes.

I'm Tariq King.

I am professor of genetics and public engagement at the University of Leicester.

And the historical figure whose DNA sequence I would love to know, it's actually two, it's the bones in the urn in Westminster that are thought to be the princes in the tower, because that is the number one question I get asked whenever I give a talk.

Hello, I'm Ben Wilbond.

I'm an actor and screenwriter.

I've been in a fair few shows, including Horrible Histories and most recently Ghosts.

Now the historical figure you'll be unsurprised to learn whose dna sequence i'd really like to know is henry viih i played him loads and i genuinely would like to know if my portrayal of him was accurate i think it was

this is our panel

turi now you in terms of this story

probably one of the biggest front page stories is something that you were involved in and a place that i think a story that i think has genuinely genuinely changed the city of Leicester.

Because it made...

That and the football.

Yeah, well, no, it's true, actually.

I went there when those two things happened, and they went to the Premier Division, and also they found that they had a king in the car.

The Premier went to the Premier Division.

Is that what it's called?

Man of the People, Robin.

What is it called?

Oh, I don't know anything about football whatsoever.

My wife took me once to see a football game, and all I did was complain about the fact there weren't enough crisps.

I have no.

I would say that as radio shows go, we have probably got one of the higher percentage of not so interested in football listeners.

That's why they're interested in science.

Let's get that out of the way, man of the people.

As long as I know.

Man of the people, you should see his wine cellar.

Anyway, so

you know, Richard was supposed to be behind us winning the Premier League that year, apparently.

He willed it into existence.

Oh, it's the Premier League.

Oh, I see.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

But this is...

So, can you tell us a little bit about that story of the fact that because from what we've been told it it really wasn't considered that likely in terms of finding a king in a car park?

Absolutely not.

So I got an email in June of 2011 from the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, the co-director of a chat called Richard Buckley.

And he emails me and he says, we're going to be doing this excavation.

We're looking for the remains of somebody who's quite famous who's buried in downtown Leicester.

And I can't tell you who it is, but don't worry, we're we're never going to find him, anyways.

So I wrote back going, Is this Richard III?

Because when I first got to this country, so I'm from Canada, when I first got to this country, my aunt took me to the Bosworth battlefield and she'd lent me books on Richard III.

So I'm like, is this Richard?

And Richard emails back going, yes, it is, but don't tell anybody.

Don't worry, we're never going to find him.

It'll be half a day of your time max.

And that was, what, 12 years ago?

Well, why was it being kept secret from you?

What was the reason?

So what had happened was a lady called Philippa Langley, who at the time was the secretary of the Scottish branch of the Richard III Society, had called up University of Leicester Archaeological Services and wanted to start this project.

So what happened was the university said, yes, we were happy to come on board, pledged money, pledged my time, things like this.

And then what happened was it was slowly a case of raising the money.

So the university put money in, the Leicester City Council put money in,

we had other funders and then they pulled out.

And so Philippa did a kind of a big whip round with the Richard III Society and they put money in.

And then the project started.

And it was, we didn't think there'd be all that much interest.

But the day before the project started, we had a little press conference.

And all of these trucks started turning up.

You know, the big fans with the satellite dishes on the top.

And amusingly enough, I took photos of them and I was like, oh my goodness, there's this massive press interest.

Little realizing that actually they'd parked right over the top of him.

We didn't know it at the time, but they'd parked right on top of this poor guy.

So here they were, kind of like filming every tiny little bit of the car park that we were going to be building, except the one place where we found him, because they were on.

Yeah, that's right.

Because they were on top of him.

I love that idea.

And who's actually the person driving the van?

He's from the Henry Yates Society.

Oh, I bet he is.

Henry Tudor.

it would be Henry Tudor.

So there's Team Henry and Team Richard, right?

So, so Richard III, obviously defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor, so you get Team Henry and Team Richard.

The reason I know that now is because just before, well, earlier on today, we watched Horrible Histories

and you all remember that wonderful song.

You've played.

Have you played?

I didn't know Jim.

Jim played Richard III, but

it was such a catchy song because we were talking about before the rhyme with Plantagenet was just absolutely

it was so good, so spot on.

No, no, come on, it's not his song.

I'll do it after this.

Come on,

I'll say that

Plantagenet rhymes with would you imagine it?

Tom, um, could you start at the beginning of this story, so that the bones are found, in this case under a car park in Leicester, but what's the process that you go through to get access to that DNA and then begin to sequence it and understand what it's telling us.

So, first of all, I get the skull, I put it in front of me, and I say, Do you consent to me taking your DNA?

The paperwork.

If yes, say nothing.

And then we have to sample in very clean conditions, if we can, in a fully clean room, hazmat suit, mask, visor,

or the kit and caboodle to try and avoid accidentally contaminating the sample without our own DNA.

I mean, actually, the sort of revolution that there's been in ancient DNA more recently has meant that contamination is very much a non-issue, or

not as much of an issue as it used to be.

But we still sort of take these precautions.

And then we have to pick the right part of the skeleton to sample.

And when DNA first started,

the ancient DNA, we had this ancient DNA revolution more recently, we didn't really know where to go for, and we were sequencing human remains and getting tiny amounts of human DNA out.

But then the field struck upon the Petrus portion of the temporal bone.

The petrus portion of the temporal bone is an immense source of DNA.

So your temporal bone is the bone on the side of your head around your ear, and the petrus portion is this pyramidal-shaped bit of bone that goes

inside your head and around your ear canal.

And really, they're clues in the name.

Petrus literally means stone-like.

It's the densest bone in the human body.

They stay constant and solid, and so that preserves the DNA exceptionally well.

So what we do is usually drill a small hole into the base of the skull into this petrus portion to collect the bone powder.

We give it to our robots, and they extract the DNA, build what are called ancient DNA libraries, and they're sequenced on the sequencer here, and that's how we get the DNA.

It's a remarkable thing that it's so fast now, isn't it?

Because the first, the Human Genome Project was a billion-dollar project, wasn't it?

That took decades, I think, wasn't it?

It was almost like the Apollo program initially.

And now, what is it, 20 years later?

It really has advanced.

The first gene that

my lab sequenced was in 1981, I think, right at the beginning of all this.

And

it took 18 months to do one gene, which now probably can be done in 15 seconds, something like that.

18 months versus 15 seconds.

Sorry, Ben.

I was just going to ask: what is the oldest?

Have you been

found something in your career and gone?

In my career.

Oh my god, that's so old.

And been really excited and realised, because I was wondering where the line was between

when you say really ancient, what's that line?

How old are we talking?

Well, not me, but the oldest ancient DNA has been two million years old.

And that DNA didn't come from a bone, it came from a sediment, so soil, ancient permafrost soil.

And

that was a couple of years ago.

So they sequenced the DNA in the soil and sort of dated it as well.

And they knew it was somewhere between two million.

The next one down from that is, I think, a mammoth that's just over one million years old.

But the oldest that I've dealt with is 14,000 years old.

So, you're still learning, is that right?

Mentioning there about the fact that contamination isn't such a problem.

I remember talking to Svanti Parbo years ago about the Neanderthal work and how careful they'd had to be in looking in that lab as well.

So, what has changed that means that contamination is not such a big problem?

Well, I have to say, we still take precautions whilst we're doing it.

So like for example when we're excavating with Richard we're in our full kind of CSI gear and doing it and then you work in a clean lab.

But these days because as Tom was saying you can see the DNA damage and so that helps you go okay that that's way more damaged that than modern DNA is.

So that helps you kind of pull it out in terms of okay that looks that looks ancient and that looks modern and the fragment sizes.

So modern DNA is much longer fragment sizes.

The fragment sizes we're getting with ancient DNA is, I mean, the average size for Richard was around 45 letters long.

Could you, then when you've got that sequence, and as you said, some of them, the longer, well, the average size is 45 letters,

how then do you take that data and say this is Richard III?

What's the process that you go through?

Okay, so

Richard III lived over 500 years ago, and the DNA that each of us carries is a very complex mixture of just some of our ancestors.

So it's only at about six generations you start to lose the DNA from any one of your ancestors.

So you get half your DNA from each of your parents, on average about a quarter from each of your grandparents, and so on back through time.

But around the kind of sixth generation point, you can have no DNA from one of those ancestors.

So Richard III left no known living descendants.

And I've got to use DNA that is passed down through the generations in a really simple way.

There's not this sort of DNA shuffling, there's not this loss.

And there's two pieces of DNA that are passed down through the generations in this really simple way.

The first one is mitochondrial DNA.

So that's a small circular piece of DNA.

It's in the egg.

So us girls, we pass it down to all of our children, but only daughters will pass it on.

And then the other piece is a segment of our DNA known as the Y chromosome.

It's one of our sex chromosomes and putting it really simply it has on it sort of the gene for maleness.

It's a gene which switches on about six weeks' gestation and sends the fetus down the path to becoming a boy.

So that is passed down from father to son to son, down through the generations.

So, what we had to do was we had to find female line relatives of Richard III.

So, we had to go up to his mum, Cecily,

down through his sister, Anne of York, and then down through the generations.

So, one person we already knew about because his family tree had already been traced.

It was in the Rouveny role, which was published in 1907, and then a chap called John Ashdown Hill had taken it down these last sort of few generations and found a lady called Joy Ibsen, who was living in Canada.

She'd sadly passed away, but Michael, her son, was living in London, happy to take a DNA test.

The problem was, is that tree was not, it didn't have all the references for it, and that was super duper important because what if I don't get a DNA match?

How do I know it's not just the tree is wrong?

So this is where we had a team at the University of Leicester and the National Archives.

They went through all of that, found all the documentary evidence, but we also found somebody else, a lady called Wendy Dull Dig.

Dull Dig.

Seriously, as a surname.

And we found her.

So I have to contact this lady.

So we Google her.

This is me and a chap called Kevin Scherer, who was kind of leading on the genealogy side.

And we got a phone number.

And

it was like the second page of the Google search.

And he's like, nah, she's not going to be there.

That's an old number.

And I thought, what's the worst that happens?

I will call this lady.

I'll go back to my office.

I'll give her a call.

So I call this lady and I go, Hello, my name is Tari King.

I'm calling from the University of Leicester.

You might have seen that we've been doing this excavation.

And we're looking for people who are related to Richard III.

So we can do a DNA comparison.

Does your DNA match the skeleton?

And we think you're one of these such relatives.

And she was like, Am I on the radio?

Is this a great call?

Yeah,

I know.

So I had to talk her through the whole thing.

And then Kevin talked to her later, and she very kindly agreed to take a DNA test for us.

So Michael Ibsen and Wendy Deldick are 14th cousins twice removed through the female line.

So they should have identical or near-identical mitochondrial DNA and that should match the skeleton.

if it's Richard.

So I'm extracting the ancient DNA from Richard and then comparing it against these known relatives.

And then also found five living male line relatives, but there wasn't a DNA match there.

Which implies?

Which implies, so it's got various names.

Tom and I were chatting about this earlier.

That's euphemism.

Non-paternity.

So this is where the biological father is not the recorded father.

So there's various names for this: non-paternity, false paternity, misattributed paternity.

But basically, it means that the biological father is not the recorded father.

And of the five that I was looking at, one didn't match the other four.

So that was telling us it was recent.

So I had to go and see him, because how do I know I haven't made him?

I've been so careful with the DNA, but maybe a mix-up or something.

So I'd like to get another DNA sample, but also just see if they know about anything in their family tree.

So we went to go and see him, and we were going to go and see him at his mom's house.

So the worry was, are we going to let the cat out the bag?

And she knows.

Anyway, so I said, can I get another DNA sample?

And that was totally fine.

And then we said, look, you don't match the other four, and there's possibilities here, one of which is what's known as a false paternity event.

And it goes quiet for a second.

And then mom suddenly pipes up and says, you know, there always was this story that so-and-so wasn't actually the son of so-and-so.

So they'd known, they just hadn't told me.

So here's taken 10 years off of my life with worry.

But they've known.

So I've got those other four, they match each other, and we know that their common ancestor is Henry Somerset.

He's the fifth Duke of Beaufort.

And he is a male line relative of Richard.

There's 19 generations between those.

And in any of those 19 generations, we know that historically there's about a 1 to 2% chance of false paternity in there.

Plenty of time for that to happen.

And it was really interesting because when we published it, so it goes, you know, Richard III and it goes up to his great-granddad, then it goes to Edward III, and then it goes down through the head, John of Gaunt, down to Henry Somerset, the fifth Duke of Beaufort.

So if the false paternity is in particular parts of that tree, it could have implications for the historical monarchy.

So should the Yorkist Plantagenet kings have been on the throne?

Should the Lancastrian Plantagenet kings be on the throne?

And if it was in a couple of generations, that affects the Tudors.

So I had worked on this for two years.

You know, I'd had to design all these new experiments because we didn't have the way of doing this.

This is like over a decade ago.

And two years, I've worked on this so hard.

And we published the paper, and I'm like, yay, ancient DNA.

And the only thing the press were really interested in was: should Queen Elizabeth be on the throne?

Should be me, shouldn't it?

Yeah, Plantagenet with me.

I love that I would watch those kind of morning, I don't know if they still exist, those Jerry Springer kind of daytime shows if those were the paternity arguments.

I believe that my husband's been lying about his plantagenet lineage.

I'm afraid we've got the test back.

Your husband is not related to Richard III.

You lying scumbag!

The chairs fly, the thrones crack.

But I get so many people who email me and say, I think I'm descended from Richard III or I think I'm related to Richard III and I have to explain, look, we're all related to Richard III.

It's weird, isn't it because everyone's related to Richard III, but very few people are related to Edward III, aren't they?

Well, no, so

apparently pretty yeah, as we know, pretty much everyone alive today with broadly British ancestry is descended from Edward III.

The chances of you not being is teeny tiny.

Paul, it might be mitochondrial DNA.

It might be worth giving a bit of a background into mitochondrial DNA, why it only goes down the female line.

Yes, so it is interesting and incredibly useful because

the genes that are in the chromosomes come from mum and from dad,

but the genes in the mitochondria just come from the mother.

So, this is the reason you can do this analysis.

It's much, much cleaner.

Also,

there's many more of the genes from mitochondria because there's more mitochondria than just the single genome.

So, it's much easier to do.

So, there's more of it, and it only comes from the mother because it comes in the cytoplasm of the egg.

That's the basic difference.

Whereas, us poor men only contribute a tiny little sperm which has only got

the DNA from the nucleus, and so the women have got it with the mitochondria.

Then what do you think

the consequence of that would be culturally if, for example,

Torrey had discovered that Henry VIII should not have been on the throne, for example, how do you think people would take that

message?

You've really dropped me in the political circle.

I just wonder, you know, because

I think,

you know, looking back,

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

And, well,

if that happened, there'd be loads of people in the press and the media getting on shows going, well, it doesn't really matter, though, as long as we've got a royal family, though, right, right.

And it would all be sort of brushed under the carpet.

It's funny we should be talking about this just two weeks after the coronation.

What are the chances, Terry, that King Charles should?

It's not the time or the place.

In terms of your family, do you have any?

We were talking about, you know, people are going, oh, well, we were related to Rich III.

And I know that on that TV show, Who Do You Think You Are?

I think John Hurt had always been told that he was related to the Kings of Ireland and basically found out that he wasn't.

And I think was quite disappointed by that.

Have you got anything like kind of family rumours of?

I rather suspect they would come back and say, I'm terribly sorry, but it's all based in Derbyshire and nobody moved

at all, anywhere interesting until you moved to London.

I'm afraid I have something more complicated.

Go on.

When I was in my late 50s, I discovered that my parents weren't my parents.

Wait a minute.

They were actually my grandparents.

And my mother was the person I thought was my sister.

And by the time I found this out, I'm afraid everybody had died.

But I confirmed it was true.

And now I have two passports, okay?

And the first passport, I have one set of parents, and in the second passport, I have another parent, because I don't actually know who my father is.

But I just know who my mother is, who was my sister.

This gets really complicated.

But you found out, didn't you, Paul?

I mean, it was, wasn't it, when you were just, you

needed to get some kind of documentation?

It It was the wonderful American Homeland Security.

They will find that out.

I was president of Rockefeller University.

I was knighted.

I had a Nobel Prize.

I applied for a green card and they rejected me.

I was actually rather impressed that they rejected me.

And what they didn't like was my birth certificate.

My birth certificate only named

me and where I was born and when I was born.

It didn't name my parents.

Now I asked asked my parents,

why weren't my parents on it?

And they said, oh, this was a cheaper birth certificate than

a birth certificate that has all that information.

And being a gullible, innocent youth, I believed them.

And only 50 years later did I discover that when I wrote to the registry office to get a full birth certificate, it came back and I heard my personal assistant whispering to my wife, saying, Is it possible that Paul got the name of his mother wrong?

And my ears, boof, boof, you know.

And then they gave me this brown envelope, all staring at me, and I opened the envelope, and there it was.

It was, my mother wasn't my mother.

It was my sister.

And then I moved my eyes around, and father, a dash.

And father remains a dash.

But hopefully, not for too much longer, because I want to drag it out.

Maybe you can help.

Maybe you can help.

One of the things we'll be doing as part of the ancient, you know which project we're working on at the Crick, is that we're sequencing skeletons from even quite recent times, so even up to Victorian Georgia, maybe 200 years old.

And the upshot of that is that sometimes if, like in Paul's case, where there's no record of the father, it's difficult to find the father, or even that there's no living relatives that might connect Paul to his father's lineage, it's possible we might accidentally sequence someone from one of these big cemeteries that is in that line.

And then Paul finds out that basically all of the data that we generate is made publicly available.

So, a lot of genealogists are sort of rubbing their hands, waiting for all the data to come out of recent towns where you can genuinely connect people with

other people.

So, this is actually introducing the whole new way of finding out that your great-great-great-grandfather wasn't who you thought he was.

Hopefully, Paul, it might turn out to be Patrick Moore, because then that'll

link absolutely beautifully with what you said earlier on.

And in fact, the other 10 people sat at his knees in Neesden were the other ten children, your brothers and sisters.

Well, we'll find out if you've got the xylophone playing gene, and then we'll know from there.

Tyrian,

what are the good sites?

I mean, for instance, the fact that Richard III, I presume, you know, as long as that's been a car park or there's been something on it, that means that there's not been that much disturbance.

So, are there certain sites that you might get to and you think, now, this is going to be really tricky for us to get to any kind of DNA evidence?

Can I just say that it can't be that the car park protected him since he was.

No, no, no.

That's why I said car park or other structures that have been there.

So, in terms of retrieving DNA from ancient remains, yeah, so best preservation for ancient DNA is cold and dry, which is why you tend to get some of the oldest DNA comes from things like caves.

And the sediment that they were looking at, this was, you know, it used to be permafrost, so it's nice and cold.

So, if you've got human remains that have been, say, in certain parts of Africa, for example, then it's much, much harder to get ancient DNA out of the DNA, degrades so much more quickly with heat and water.

Paul, how far can

we go back in extracting useful information about human history and actually even before human history to go back through

the history of evolution of life on Earth?

Well, Tom could probably deal better with the human evolution because it's his trade.

But

we can look really quite far back.

I work on yeast and I work on what controls the division of a yeast cell from one to two.

And we discovered some years ago now that it was the same genes that control it in yeasts as control it in human beings.

Now, the last time

we had a common ancestor

between yeast and humans was quite a long time ago, actually.

Around 1,500 million years ago.

And just to put that in context, dinosaurs went extinct a mere 65 million years ago.

So it's a long time ago.

So we've done

a comparison of sequences, working with the University of Nottingham actually, where they've got very good what are called bioinformatics people, people who look at these sequences, and they have predicted the best guess of what that gene looked like 1,500 million years ago.

And so, we have now made that gene and we've put it back in yeast, and it works.

Now, I'm not quite saying that we've taken a a gene from 1,500 million years ago, but we are saying that we are taking a gene that can't be very far from what it looked like 1,500 million years ago.

Isn't it amazing?

And the next extraordinary.

The next step, Ben, is looking at volunteers, human volunteers.

We're actually not far from Jurassic Park, are we?

We're not far, are we?

Well, you could.

I mean, if you, you know, if we're here.

Go on.

If you want to make another film,

rather than getting the DNA out of a bit of amber, which isn't going to work, you could predict in the way I've just described all the genes that went back to dinosaurs and make your dinosaur.

Yeah, but the fact you've only got to yeast means that rather than Jurassic dough with dinosaurs,

don't sneering,

but I'm seeing more like a load of Pillsbury doughboys going around the park.

Oh my god, here comes another croissant!

I thought it was going to be Jurassic Brewery.

Yeah,

but Tommy, we're going to...

Can you make dinosaurs then organise a dinosaur theme park in a brewery?

The thing is, well, yeah,

you would never be able to get the DNA directly from the dinosaurs because they live far away.

But as Paul says, too far back in the past, the DNA just wouldn't survive.

But as Paul said,

you could maybe try and reconstruct what the dinosaur genes were like if you compared

to organisms.

But every now and again, these ideas come up of doing it with mammoths, because we do have genomes of mammoths.

But the only real two ways of doing it is

genetic engineering, an elephant, so you bring back some of the genes that the mammoth had, in which case what you have is a hairy elephant, it's not a mammoth in my book.

Or you have a half-mammoth, half-elephant embryo that you grow inside an elephant and it gives birth to.

But again, arguable whether that's a mammoth rather than a half-elephant, half-mammoth monstrosity.

Also, there is that thing, isn't it?

Rather than bring extinct animals back to life, maybe stop making animals that are currently alive extinct.

You know, it just.

Over that kind of, let's say, 100-million-year time scale, how much does a genome change?

Is that even a reasonable question, is it?

Right, you're looking at me.

Well, there'll be some genes for sure that are similar.

We can live with that, yes.

But not all the genes will be there.

And

the ones that are there will have some similarity with the other ones.

This is exactly

a fine statement.

I saw you recently at a select committee, and that's the kind of dexterity you demonstrated when asked about science funding in Brexit.

We won't go into that.

Well, we need to get now, Brian, you were talking about a church near where you've been recently has got quite an interesting

kind of what's it tell us what's in the church maybe to sorry because you you you're now you know one of the most famous people in the field because of this discovery.

And there's a church

that I visited which had a relic, it was a religious relic, basically.

And they were claiming it was the skull of Mary Magdalene.

So do you get approached to say, verify this skull?

We want to know who this is.

Because obviously I have an interest in it not being disproved, because then it will be a less popular church.

And I understand there are people who work on relics, but with the issue with that is like, how do you prove that it's Mary Magdalene?

Because the whole thing with the Richard III case was you've got this unidentified individual, and so what you do is you compare the DNA from that with a known relative to see if there's a match, as you would expect.

With Mary Magdalene, to my knowledge, we don't have any one kicking around that we could use.

See, that is a good who do you think you are if that was the revelation.

But that's, I mean, I was fascinated by that, which is also, we were talking about,

there used to be a lot of churches in France, there might still be, that have those kind of religious relics.

And I presume we were trying to work out whether that was the trade of people coming back from the Crusades who'd bring back any old bag of bones and splinters and go, Well, this is a little bit of the cross of Jesus, and these are the toenails of Judas Iscariot, and you know, that kind of thing.

I've been asked to verify Jesus, and I said no.

Really?

So, how would that again, right?

No, not by the Pope, presumably.

Who asked you?

I just want to know.

But it's such an odd question.

Because, you know, somebody comes to you and look, we've got this splinter of bone, or we've got this bit of blood, and we think it might be Jesus.

And can you tell us if it is?

It's like, well, no.

For a number of reasons, but really because we don't have any relatives to compare the DNA against.

Tom, in the introduction, we mentioned a box of bones.

And you are currently, again, going back, the bones of royalty, Winchester Cathedral.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that project is?

Yes, so as part of

these thousands of genomes that we're looking at, we've sampled some remains from these Winchester mortuary chests.

This is a project being driven by Winchester Cathedral.

So, what's it called?

The Winchester Mortuary chests.

So, I mean, mortuary chest is just another word for a box of bones, really.

And

the reason is because they held the remains of some early kings of Wessex, so the West Saxon Kingdom of England, and then later on,

kings of England.

But during the English Revolution, well, English Civil War, the parliamentarians decided to have a kickabout with them, and they were all emptied out of their individual mortary chests that named who should be in there.

And so they all got mixed up.

There was some thought that perhaps they weren't genuine, and it's pretty easy as most churches are essentially surrounded by freebones.

It's possible that they could have just sort of gone and got some new ones to replace the old ones.

But Bristol, University of Bristol, did some radiocarbon dating and found that they date to the Rhine time period when these kings were supposed to to be alive.

So they looked like that they were probably genuine.

So you've got some kings from the sort of 8th and 9th centuries AD, some from the 9th and 10th, and then some from the 11th as well, as well as a queen.

Wessex and English kings,

the Anglo-Saxon kings, they were named

alliteratively, so they all be in the same letter.

So in those boxes, you should have King Kinney's

and his son, King Kinnewolf.

And so we should be able to pick up those.

I know, I don't know.

Aragorn and Frodo.

So, they were kings of Wessex in the 8th century, so we could potentially identify them by looking at the relationships between them.

And then, you have Egbert, one of the first kings of England,

his son, Ethelwolf.

We miss out some of the sort of A-listers for some reason.

Some of the A-listers are okay in.

So, Alfred's not in there, Ethelred isn't in there.

But King Canute is supposed to be in there, the famous Danish king and wave botherer.

He's in there as well as his

Queen Emma.

So, we should be able to genetically piece back together who is who and whether it's genuine.

Well, we'll never be able to say if it's like with which the third, we'll never be able to say for certain that it's these people, but at least we can assess the likelihood based on the relationships and their genetic ancestry and things.

And this is important in some ways.

King Knut and Queen Emma, you know, their relationship, Queen Emma was also had children with and was married to Ethelred the Unready and had children with him.

But then when Knut, who is this Danish king who essentially conquered the entirety of England and took Emma for his own wife and had a child with him.

Half a Cnute was his child.

So this is essentially led to the succession crisis, which led to William of Normandy invading and the Norman conquest.

So these sort of kings in these boxes are pivotal to sort of early English history.

So we can answer some of these interesting questions about their ancestry.

So it's interesting in the earliest Wessex kings, they have Brythonic, so Celtic names, so using languages that are not sort of English related, they're sort of more related to the Celtic.

So there's a question about whether those early kings were descended from migrations of people from continental Europe and sort of just adopted the Celtic names, or whether they were just local people that, somehow, in this environment where migrants and their descendants were sort of becoming kings, they managed to come out on top.

And, Ben, how much do you think where we've got to now with the study of genetics could have changed horrible histories 10-15 years ago?

Well, Robin, that's an incredibly interesting question.

I think

the show itself was so incredibly well researched and very, very carefully put together in terms of what we could and could not touch.

So if there was any sort of doubt surrounding something, obviously you're not going to be presenting that on a show that says

this is fact, this is the truth, this actually happened.

But now that we've gone down the whole false paternity, the false paternity route, and the whole royal question, I mean, it's fascinating.

It could open up a huge debate on all, you know, all of our history.

I mean, it could, right?

When you'll be able to look at a sort of map of where everyone came from, and that's going to open up a whole handover.

And the fact that it shows that we're all related to one another.

So I love all of that kind of stuff.

The fact that, you know,

who we're related to, but the fact that eventually we are all related to one another.

And I love that.

Not only

we're related to every living thing on this planet.

Let's go back far enough, back to yeast,

Paul wept as he cut another loaf of bread.

Oh,

my darling uncle.

By the way, what's your favourite really disgusting death?

Because I remember my son loved, I think it was it, William the Conqueror, who exploded in his coffin

after he died.

Did you have a favourite death?

I thought it wasn't a disgusting death then.

No, no, no, you're right, it was a disgusting death.

A disgusting post-death.

The stupid death segment.

I think one of my favourites, I think he fell down a toilet and

just like just fell into a

sort of collapsed and into a toilet and died.

I mean, there's all sorts of, it was a great idea for a segment the writer's got.

Well, thank you very much for both disgusting and educating our children through disgusting them.

So we asked our audience a question as well, and we asked them whose bones would you most like to dig up in a car park and why?

And how powerful?

We had to reject most of them because they were currently serving politicians.

So we've got the ones that are left.

The main reason we had to reject them was nothing to do with taste and decency or anything like that.

It was just that they're currently serving, and by the time this goes out, they won't be.

Okay, right, here we go.

Elvis, why?

Just to make sure he really has left the building.

My own would imply we've cracked time travel.

What have you got, Ben?

I've got Mr.

Funnybones, because according to my children, I don't have any anymore.

Brackets, I think my wife buried them in the car park, and that's from Rob.

So that means both Rob's children are now teenagers, obviously, because they've got 20.

E.

Ts.

Then we'd know for sure, not that I want him to die, it was traumatic enough the first time round.

Oh, I thought it was extraterrestrials generally, but literally E.T.s.

Yeah.

Richard III's horse.

Presumably nearby.

What have you got there, Ben?

Whose bones would you most likely dig up in a car park?

Answer, puzzled Napoleon.

Brackets, Napoleon, bone apart.

Adrian, Adrian, see me afterwards.

King Richard III, because it would confuse the hell out of the first lot of archaeologists.

So thank you very much to our panel, Paul Nurse, Tom Booth, Turi King, and Ben Wilbond.

Next week, we are going to see if we are able to pass our Turing test as we look into future possibilities and possibly illogical fears around AI.

Yeah, I do find human fears illogical.

Yeah and that's why you're going to be failing your Turing test.

I knew I've just not got your emotional circuitry right.

He still thinks he's a real boy.

Anyway, so

thank you.

Bye-bye.

Hello, it's me, Jade Addams, and I'm back with a second series of Welcome to the Neighborhood.

This is the Radio 4 podcast, where myself and the celebrity guests like to have a nosy round social media groups from up and down the country.

A bit of a strange one, but I am looking to get rid of a second-hand coffin.

My mum has found this little metal box in her garden.

Can anybody local please remove three stitches out of my neck?

This series, I'm joined by some top people, including Nick Grimshaw.

It's a grenade.

Is he sooty?

That's my favourite reply.

And self-esteem.

If you think I should cover this one up, you should see me other one.

Bloody L.

Head to BBC Sounds to find brand new episodes of Welcome to the Neighbourhood with me, Jade Adams.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.