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## A Convergence of Evidence and Time
The story of Richard III’s bones begins, in one sense, in the fifteenth century: a man born at Fotheringhay Castle in 1452 who lived through the Wars of the Roses, ruled England for two years, died in battle at 32, and was buried in a Franciscan friary by people who did not expect his burial to become historically significant.
It runs through five centuries of urban development, gradual forgetting, and incomplete transmission of historical memory: the Dissolution that destroyed the friary, the successive constructions and demolitions that built the modern city over the medieval one, the occasional references to a riverside pillar or a tradition of a burial that may never have been where tradition said it was.
It runs through the genealogical chain: the daughters who had daughters, through fifteen generations of ordinary lives in England and then Canada, that connected Joy Ibsen and her son Michael to a mitochondrial ancestor born in the 1420s and a nephew who died in the 1480s.
It runs through the documentary research: historians reading medieval maps, arguing about sixteenth-century chronicles, reconstructing genealogical chains from parish records and legal documents across multiple countries and centuries.
It converges in August 2012 in a car park in Leicester: two leg bones appearing in the soil at the bottom of a trench, on the first afternoon of the first day of an excavation that many people thought was unlikely to find what it was looking for.
The identification announced in February 2013 and published in December 2014 brought these threads together under a probability framework that expressed the convergence quantitatively. Six point seven million to one. Under the modeling assumptions of the research team, at their most conservative, the evidence in its entirety pointed to this being the remains of Richard III by odds that no reasonable interpretation of the evidence could dismiss.