Genetic testing has confired the identity of Nicolaus Copernicus' remains, and suggests that modern astronomy's father had bright blue eyes.
His bones were found four years ago under a Roman Catholic cathedral in Frombork, Poland. Forensic reconstruction of the skull suggested a resemblance to Copernicus. The bones' DNA matched the DNA of hairs found in a book that had belonged to him.
Those results were informally announced last November by Polish researchers, and are formally described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers also used mitochondrial DNA — which is passed intact from mother to child, making it a favorite tool for archaeological genetics — to confirm the match. The profile found in the bones and hair have only been found in four other European individuals, making a coincidental match extremely unlikely.
Copernicus also possessed a variation in a gene called HERC2 that's usually seen in people with blue eyes.
Most paintings depict Copernicus, the first astronomer to realize that Earth orbited the sun, an intellectual father of the scientific revolution, as having dark eyes. But he likely peered at the heavens through baby blues.
Citation: "Genetic identification of putative remains of the famous astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus." By Wiesław Bogdanowica, Marie Allen, Wojciech Branickic, Maria Lembring, Marta Gajewska, and Tomasz Kupiec. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 27, July 6, 2009.
*Images: 1. PNAS 2. University of Arizona
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See Also:
- How the Telescope Changed Our Minds
- Feb. 19, 1473: Copernicus Born
- Skulls vs. DNA: Zeroing In on American Origins
- Culture May Be Encoded in DNA
- DNA Could Illuminate Origins of Medieval Manuscripts
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