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Another dead King & a skull

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  • 18-02-2013 10:13pm
    #1
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭


    Now that Richard III is ‘sorted’ it is the turn of the French who are losing the head over one of their monarchs!

    A Dr. Phillippe Charlier who carried out tests in the past is now claiming that the head is definitely that of Henri IV (Abstract from his paper - A mummified head was identified in 2010 as belonging to Henri IV, King of France. A putative blood sample from the King Louis XVI preserved into a pyrographically decorated gourd was analyzed in 2011. Both kings are in a direct male-line descent, separated by seven generations. We have retrieved the hypervariable region 1 of the mitochondrial DNA as well as a partial Y-chromosome profile from Henri IV. Five STR loci match the alleles found in Louis XVI, while another locus shows an allele that is just one mutation step apart. Taking into consideration that the partial Y-chromosome profile is extremely rare in modern human databases, we concluded that both males could be paternally related. The likelihood ratio of the two samples belonging to males separated by seven generations (as opposed to unrelated males) was estimated as 246.3, with a 95% confidence interval between 44.2 and 9729. Historically speaking, this forensic DNA data would confirm the identity of the previous Louis XVI sample, and give another positive argument for the authenticity of the head of Henri IV.)

    However, not all agree - "Holders of these DNA can be related, but the two sequences do not completely correspond.," according to Prof. Jean-Jacques Cassiman, specialist in Genetics at the University of Louvain, who made a comparison between the mytochondrial DNA and that of Anne of Romania, who descends in an unbroken female line from the mother of Henri IV.

    Grauniad here

    Figaro here


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