Richard III of England - DNA Results

This little item casts a lot of doubt on the identification of the head as Henri IV:

http://omicsonline.org/open-access/discussion-surrounding-the-ident...

They do make a not entirely warranted assumption late in the paper, that Louis XIV and his brother Philippe had the same father (confirmed by the Bourbon Y-DNA analysis, since two of the samples were from descendants of Louis and one from a descendant of Philippe), and that said father was Louis XIII (presumptive but hardly conclusive).

There are no other male-line descendants of Louis XIII, or his (probable) father Henri IV, available for testing, so the matter rests there.

Unfortunately the provenance of both items (the blood in the gourd and the mummified head) is not nearly so clear-cut as most people think.

In the case of the blood in the gourd, the probability of "pious fraud" is fairly high, and the autosomal non-matches strongly suggest that as an explanation (the "G2a" haplotyping being icing on the cake for the "Merovingianists").

For the head, see link posted above - the chain of possession was actually broken in several places, and even its origin is suspect.

Even a more sophisticated modern retest was not able to retrieve more than seven usable Y-DNA markers from the head, and this time *two* did not match.

mtDNA tests on the head, and on the mummified heart of Louis XVII (the "Lost Dauphin", whose identity had previously been confirmed by comparison with samples from known female-line relatives, including a present-day individual) showed no match at all - which is strange, because Henri IV's mother *was* a female-line relative of Marie-Antoinette.

All things considered, the head is suspect, the gourd is highly suspect, and the only thing that can be said for certain is that the present-day Bourbons are descendants of Louis XIV and his brother.

Thanks for the reference. I hadn't seen that one. It doesn't change my mind, though. I'm going to continue to be the same truculent skeptic as always ;)

Until they do sufficient triangulation to constitute a genuine scientific control, I'm not buying the chatter. In fact, I'm always going to be more skeptical of modern descendants as an adequate control than I am of old remains. For me, it's just too much of a coincidence that Louis XVI matches Henri IV.

Some day the governments in Britain and France will give their consent to opening tombs and testing verified bodies. Then we'll have a wealth of new information.

You can thank (preferably with a baseball bat) Henry VII and VIII for making it so hard to identify any Plantagenet DNA - they went after the rival clan with fire and sword, and eliminated practically all the male (and at least one female) possible claimants.

Five STR matches out of a mere six or seven total retrievable? That wouldn't wash in a modern court of law - and the mtDNA mismatch is even more suspicious.

I think the French government will yield before the Windsors do. It's no longer any skin off their butts.

I stick to my guns, even with only five STR matches out of a mere six or seven. In fact, if I wouldn't be guilty of mixing metaphors I would even be tempted to double down ;)

The science is interesting, but it just isn't good enough either way.

When I read these papers I like to engage my mind. I think about where I would attack the findings if I were working in the field. And perhaps more importantly, I ask myself what might come next that wouldn't surprise me.

Those five STR matches? They wouldn't even make it *into* a modern court of law. Too far out on the edge. The case would be ripped to shreds on cross-examination. And that's a problem that cuts both ways.

Mystery head - may be Henri IV, maybe not. Insufficient surviving Y-DNA, and the surviving mtDNA doesn't match supposed maternal-line descendant Louis XVII (maternity is FAR harder to intercept than paternity). Discrepancies between the head and recorded appearance of Henri IV. Chain of possession broken at several points.

Mystery blood in gourd - almost certainly not Louis XVI. Wrong Y-DNA haplotype, and significant autosomal discrepancies. Probably a "pious fraud" perpetrated by persons unknown.

Bourbon Y-DNA haplotyping - probably valid, identifies the current (if not the distant historical) Bourbon haplotype, and confirms descent of current Bourbon line from Louis XIV and younger brother Philippe. Paternity question remains open pending an opportunity to test aDNA from preserved(?) heart of Louis XIII.

Capetian and Valois Y-DNA haplotypes as yet unconfirmed - further research needed.

Plantagenet Y-DNA - the safe presumption is that Richard III *does* represent it and that it *is* G2a. The Beaufort/Somerset lineage includes several suspect links and one known recent (within 5 generations) Non-Paternal Event. Further research is still needed to confirm this presumption.

It's fun to choose up sides and make predictions, but here's a different way of seeing it.

In the FB group for Haplogroup G they're running a poll. "King Richard III Plantagenet of England (1452-1485) turned out to be G2-P287+.
The researchers only tested G-M201, G1-M285, and G2-P287. His Powerplex 23 FORENSIC STRs (*not* including DYS388!) indicate some possibilities within G2a2b-L30. What do you think the specific Plantagenet G clade is?"

Choices include G-M406, G-L497, and G-U1. All reasonable guesses based on the STRs. Each of them has their vocal partisans.

But the #1 most popular answer so far is "Peer-reviewed? So where the hell is the BAM file so we can check for ourselves?"

They've been reorganizing the tree again: http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_G2a_Y-DNA.shtml

L30 is now G2a3 and subclades.

G-M406+ is Alps/Eastern Med and has only two subclades (G2a3a1/L14 and G2a3a2/L645).

P303 is the biggie, with multiple sub-subclades including U1 and L497 (among others). There is even a sub-sub-subclade (G2a3b1a3a1/L640) that is specifically "British Isles".

One wonders how much deep-testing is possible on Y-DNA that old (or older), and how specific it is possible to get.

I'm a G. It's been interesting to watch the tree grow and change. I was one of FTDNA's earliest customers (2000). Ten years ago, they were still struggling to distinguish G2a from I1. They actually comped my first SNP test to help define the boundaries. And (my little claim to fame), L42 was first discovered in my DNA when the experts were looking for an SNP that would break up P303 into smaller groups. All those steps between P303 and L42 came from filling in later.

Now, with the plummeting cost of sequencing and all the new orders for the "Big Y" the tree is being refined almost daily. I'm a co-admin for the L497 project (along with Geni curator Anne Berge), so I have a "front row seat".

One of the frustrations over the test on Richard III is that they didn't test DYS-388. We know from experience that this a pivotal location in Haplo G. (It's how they knew to look for an SNP in my DNA.) I joined the CNN Q&A on FB yesterday, intending to ask why they didn't test it but the discussion was so general it would have been churlish to ask. I think the answer might have been that they didn't know Richard III was going to be a G, so they didn't know to look.

For what it's worth, there are two more recent and more authoritative trees than the one at Eupedia.

The ISOGG tree at http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_HapgrpG.html

And Ray Banks' extended tree at https://sites.google.com/site/extendedgtree/

Ray also has an experimental tree at https://sites.google.com/site/compositeytree/g

Oh, they moved L30 AGAIN. How are we supposed to keep track? :-D

This is of slightly more than academic interest to me, with a G (probably G2a3b1) ancestor (mixed descent), some but not all of whose lines of descent have had R1b incursions. (There was also an attempt to latch an I2 line onto him, but it didn't take.)

Familytreedna.com has him (Thomas Plummer of Anne Arundel) marked in green as "confirmed" (predicted results are marked in red). I wonder how they managed that?

At FTDNA green (confirmed) means the living descendant had an SNP test that confirmed membership in the haplogroup. Red (predicted) means the STR pattern of the living descendant shows he probably belongs to that haplogroup.

Neither a confirmed result nor a predicted result really offer any assurance about the claimed ancestor. For that you need triangulation among living descendants who are distant cousins of one another. What you get with triangulation is decreasing probability of an NPE, but it never quite reaches 100% certainty.

There are always a few people whose imagination exceeds paper records. I've seen a few who claim male line descent from Ragnar Lothbrok and similarly improbable ancestors.

In other words it means they didn't take and test the ancestor directly (with perhaps a few rare exceptions). So we're back to relying on the paper trail and hoping there wasn't any hanky-panky. (sigh)

Yep.

Well. With the Plummers, as with the Plantagenets, we know there WAS hanky-panky. We just don't know where, or in this case even what, it was.

Which means that we *don't*, after all, know the "true" Anne Arundel Plummer haplotype, because it could easily be either G or R1b.

Which means *everything* has to be rechecked....

At least I'm pretty sure I'm not related to the Anne Arundel Plummers.

IIRC you're in the Kemp Plummer group - chatty bunch of letter-writers, which makes it easier to sort out who's related to whom. :-)

Judy I have the same back problem as your daughter have to.

What was Richard III of England mtDNA Haplogroup is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoliosis

Strange, me to, but I managed to get it straight on my own without any
need of somekind of straightening structure that they wanted to
fit on me.

Becky: J1c2c, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_haplogroups_of_notable_people#...

They analyzed and announced that one first.

Maven Thank you. Does any one know if any royalty line have mtDNA H3b2?

This should give you an idea of the current state of knowledge: http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/25236-Haplogroups-of-European-...

Fair warning, though - some of the results are extrapolative based on the assumption that they were their sons' fathers (e.g. Louis XIII - the circumstances of Louis XIV's reported conception were decidedly peculiar).

I rather hope they do a full deep-test analysis on Richard III, and publish the results somewhere easily accessible. He might make an interesting comparison to, e.g., Thomas Plummer of Anne Arundel (one of whose descendants did a deep-test but did not care to, or could not, make his ancestry public).

Given the randy-rabbit nature of many Plantagenet men, one might find matches popping up in quite unexpected places. ;-)

As to my previous suggestion, Supplementary Table 4 from the Nature article gives a partial Y-DNA chart of Richard III...it's enough to tell that he's not a match to the Anne Arundel Plummers, so they are not covert Plantagenets. (Another fun theory blown away by dull facts!)

Maven Thank you for the link.

If I may break the thread of scientific discussion, it was scarcely only the Plantagenets who acted like randy rabbits. Trying to deal with one North-Welsh family and link them into their society is like building a huge haystack and then having to look for needles in it.

I used to think that there was some social equality in genealogy; the idea is that you have an equal chance of being descended from anyone at any date who still has descendants (although not an equal chance of being able to trace the ancestry). While this may be the case, it is pretty obvious from some of the huge gentry families in England some of whom at least went on to produce equally huge families that a pretty Malthusian process was going on until the eighteenth century, with those at the bottom of the social tree having less and less chance of producing descendants. One line of the Salusburys of Flintshire (through an illegitimate son) ends up with the son of a pub-keeper (probably himself descended from a gentry family) who inherits the land and becomes an MP; his son becomes an MP and marries nearly equally old gentry , but his children all die young and back goes all of the land (and the name) go to very old gentry (the Trelawnys)- all of these incorporating the Salusbury family name as part of their own.

Randy rabbit behaviour in the upper classes seems to have varied over time. People find opportunities everywhere, but if you have servants in close attendance the opportunities tend to diminish. Equally with architecture; only in the 18th century did people start to put in special stair-cases for servants, so that they (and what you did overnight) could be kept rigidly separate.

Perhaps randy rabbit behaviour was therefore even more common in the lower classes. There is a surviving report of (believe it or not) a Papal Commission going around the Romney Marshes in, I think, the early 1200s and reporting sexual misdemeanours, found everywhere, among the peasantry and clergy. If you had to work outside you had more chance of a bit of nooky behind a hedgerow. You also have less chance of living descendants,

Mark

PS. In the fourteenth century the architecture of castles was designed on the basis of a marked distrust of their garrisons (this was the high tide of mercenaries). So the "solar" (the family apartments of the owner, in effect) could be approached by only one spiral staircase, with the spiral going round in a way which gave the sword-advantage to any possible defenders of the solar against mutineers coming up. What this meant in terms of possible adultery is that (if the husband was out) there was a perfect opportunity if the person or persons entitled to take messages to the wife was reasonably attractive. But the husband would presumably try to ensure that any authorised access to the solar was restricted to people whom he thought could not provide a source of attraction/diversion (life must have been very boring for women shut up in these circumstances).

Mark

It's my personal opinion that as DNA studies proliferate we'll start to see many more yDNA matches radiating out from the chief manors of medieval nobles. There must have been plenty of randy sons (and fathers) working their way through the local maidens. Over the centuries the cumulative affect should be noticeable, even if it never turns out to be provable..

I've read that G2-p287 is very rare in europe. Its more commonly found in germany, bavaria, russia, a small group of people in spain, in ashkenazy male jews.

It's only 2% of people that showed this group in GB, with the higjest concentration in Wales.

So whiever in the line was cuckold, it would be by someone who had immediate, easy and regular access to the queens at the time of conception.

In doing detecrive work, there could have been someone from these countries near one of the queens and I am sure it can be found.

Richard's father's second wife was spanish for exemple.