DNA helps match ‘Effectively Man’ skeleton to 800-year-old Norwegian saga

A Norwegian saga written greater than 800 years in the past describes how a lifeless man was thrown right into a fort effectively – and now, researchers consider they’ve recognized the stays of this man.

The Sverris saga is an 182-verse Outdated Norse textual content that data the exploits of King Sverre Sigurdsson, who rose to energy within the second half of the twelfth century AD. One half says {that a} rival clan who attacked Sverresborg fort, close to Trondheim, Norway, “took a dead man and cast him unto the well, and then filled it up with stones”.

The effectively was contained in the fort’s ramparts and was the neighborhood’s solely everlasting water supply. It has been speculated that the person thrown into the effectively within the saga might have had a illness and placing him there was an early act of organic warfare.

In 1938, a medieval effectively within the ruins of Sverresborg fort was partly drained and a skeleton was discovered beneath rubble and boulders on the backside. Whereas it was broadly believed that the skeleton, known as Effectively Man, was the stays of the person talked about within the saga, it wasn’t attainable to substantiate this on the time.

Now, Anna Petersén on the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Analysis in Oslo and her colleagues have used radiocarbon relationship and DNA evaluation of a tooth from the physique to point out that the date vary the person was alive is in step with the raid on the fort. Whereas not definitive proof that the person was the one talked about within the saga, the “circumstantial evidence is consistent with this conclusion”, says Perersén.

What’s extra, the workforce has been ready so as to add to the story. “The research we have done has shown many details concerning both the event and the man that the saga episode doesn’t mention,” says Petersén.

For instance, the DNA suggests he most probably had blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair. The researchers additionally consider his ancestors had been from what’s now Vest-Agder, the southernmost Norwegian county, based mostly on comparisons with the DNA of contemporary and historical Norwegians.

One factor they couldn’t discover was any proof that the person was thrown into the effectively as a result of he had a illness or to render the ingesting water unusable, however in addition they discovered no proof in opposition to it, leaving the query unanswered.

Michael Martin on the Norwegian College of Science and Expertise in Trondheim says the workforce’s method of matching historic paperwork with DNA proof may be utilized to assemble household bushes of long-dead royal households or to “physically describe and sketch out the life stories, such as movement between geographic regions, of the otherwise anonymous people whose remains are recovered from archaeological excavations”.

“This is, to my knowledge, the oldest case where genomic information has been recovered from a specific character, or even a specific person, mentioned in an ancient text,” says Martin.

He says by producing genomic info from historical skeletal stays, we will present new particulars about an individual. “These details are not in the original text, thus the genetic data enriches the story and provides a way to separate fact from fiction,” says Martin.