The name Richard III now attaches to a specific skeleton in a specific grave in a specific cathedral. The questions the bones cannot answer remain open, as such questions always do. History is always partly recovered and partly lost. What has been recovered here is more than a skeleton: it is the confirmation that a specific human being, with a specific spine and specific wounds and a specific set of mitochondrial variants, lived and died and was buried in a specific place and is no longer missing.
That is what the car park gave back. That is what the DNA confirmed. That is what the bones beneath the tarmac, patient across five centuries, had been waiting to say.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement