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## The 2014 Paper and Bayesian Synthesis
The formal scientific publication of the Richard III findings appeared in Nature Communications in December 2014, nearly two years after the initial announcement. The delay reflected the time required to complete the full analysis, to conduct the Bayesian statistical synthesis of all the evidence, and to pass through peer review at a major scientific journal.
The lead author was Turi King; the paper had multiple co-authors from Leicester and other institutions. Its publication represented the formal scientific record of the identification and replaced the preliminary announcement as the appropriate basis for any claims about what was and was not established.
The paper’s central analytical contribution was a Bayesian framework that combined all the available evidence — the archaeological context, the radiocarbon dating, the skeletal analysis, the genealogical documentation, and both the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA results — into a single quantitative assessment of the probability that the skeleton was Richard III.
The Bayesian analysis produced an identification probability of approximately 99.999 percent, or odds of about 6.7 million to one in favor of the identification, under the paper’s modeling assumptions.
It is important to understand what this number represents. It is not a DNA test accuracy figure; it is the output of a probabilistic model that incorporates all the available evidence under a set of assumptions about the prior probability of the identification, the rarity of the mitochondrial sequence, the genealogical completeness, and other factors. The model’s output is sensitive to the assumptions built into it. The paper’s authors described the figure as the result “at its most conservative” — meaning they had structured the model’s assumptions in ways intended to avoid overstating the confidence.