skeletons found on medieval battlefields

#SKELETONS FOUND ON MEDIEVAL BATTLEFIELDS SERIES#

Today's Lebanese people are clearly descended from the people who have lived in the area since the Bronze Age, with little trace of the temporary European invaders. It turned out that they hadn't changed very much. Lebanon between 237 and 632 CE, when the area was part of the Roman Empire. In fact, Haber and his colleagues compared the genomes of modern Lebanese people with DNA extracted from the bones of people who lived near Mt. Ghosts of the pastīut although hundreds of thousands of Europeans fought and settled in the Levant from 1095 to 1291, there's no trace of European ancestry in the genomes of the people living in Lebanon today. Their children-and perhaps their children's children-apparently grew up to fight in the next round of warfare.

#SKELETONS FOUND ON MEDIEVAL BATTLEFIELDS SERIES#

It's one thing to say that the Crusades were a 200-year series of conflicts, but it's another to realize that a wave of European migrants to the Levant intermarried with local people. Either way, it underscores how long the Crusades lasted. That seems to suggest that these two soldiers both had European fathers and Near Eastern mothers, but it's also possible that their parents came from mixed ancestries themselves there's no way to say for sure based on the DNA evidence. Mitochondrial DNA, which passes only from mother to child, was less clear: the two soldiers' mitochondrial genomes both fell into a group that's common all over Europe and the Near East. So did the two soldiers with mixed ancestry. The three Europeans' Y-chromosome DNA fell into groups of lineages usually associated with European ancestry. Because that particular set of DNA is usually passed directly from father to son, it's possible to trace paternal lineages through Y-chromosome DNA the same way that maternal lineages can be traced through mitochondrial DNA. To get more information about the two soldiers' ancestry, Haber and his colleagues looked at DNA sequences from their Y chromosomes.

But the other two soldiers would fall somewhere in the middle, which suggests that they may have been the children of Europeans and Near Eastern people. If you used statistical analysis to group the most similar genomes together (which is exactly what Haber and his colleagues did), the three European soldiers would cluster together in one group, and the four Lebanese soldiers would form another. But it's reasonably likely-based on the date of the coin and radiocarbon dating of material from the pits-that these skeletons could be the remains of some of those men.

Whether he really did that is unclear, of course. Accounts from the time describe Louis personally piling soldiers' decomposing remains into mass graves in the aftermath. In 1253, Louis' forces suffered a major defeat at Sidon, and the king himself arrived on the scene a few days after the 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.īefore becoming the namesake of the largest metro area in Missouri, French King Louis IX led the Seventh Crusade, a final (and ultimately failed) push by European forces to wrest control of Syria and Lebanon from Muslim rulers based in Egypt. 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. Louis, a 12th- to 13th-century Crusader stronghold near Sidon, in south Lebanon. Living and dying side by sideįor centuries, the mingled, charred bones of at least 25 soldiers lay buried in two mass graves near the ruins of the Castle of St. 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. Claude Doumet-Serhal reader comments 66 withĮuropean 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.īut 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.

Skeletons found on medieval battlefields