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A raw scientific examination of 800 - year - old human remains in Norway corroborates a royal account claiming that a numb torso was throw there to envenom its piss .
The skeletal corpse of the human race were found in a well in a Norse castle in 1938 . Now , a new report , published Friday ( Oct. 24 ) in the journaliScience , combinesradiocarbon datingand DNA psychoanalysis to find out that he probably died in 1197 during a maraud on the castling of the Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson near Trondheim , in fundamental Norway . The events are record in " Sverris Saga , " one of the " King ’s Sagas , " or prose poem , compose in Norway and Iceland between the 12th and fourteenth centuries to glorify Scandinavian kings .
A new analysis of human remains from a medieval well in central Norway seem to corroborate the events of an 800-year-old Norse saga.
Study co - authorMichael Martin , an evolutionary geneticist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology , told Live Science this may be the first time a person in the Norse sagas had been obtain .
He noted hereditary analysis was used to identify the remains ofEngland ’s power Richard III , but they were from 1485 . The body in the well , however , go out from 100 before , in 1197 : " This is the early time that genomic approaches have been applied , " Martin said .
New ancient DNA analysis also suggested that the dead man ’s ancestor came from southerly Norway , which challenge the assumption by some researchers that he was one of the castle defenders from key Norway . rather , either this shielder had origins in the south , or the aggressor had thrown one of their own dead into the well , the writer wrote .
The skeleton was found in the well in 1938 during excavations at Sverresborg Castle near Trondheim, a stronghold of the 12th-century Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson.
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Poisoning the well
archaeologist conceive " Sverris Saga " was write around the time of the events it describes , and perhaps under the supervision of Sverre himself , who ruled from about 1177 until his death in 1202 .
According to the study , the 182 - poetry prose poem relate Sverre ’s raise to majestic power in Norway in the second half of the 12th 100 . It details many of the battle fought by his soldiers , called " Birkebeiner " or " birch rod legs " after the birch rod - barque wrap they wore to protect their lower ramification ; while Sverre ’s primary enemies were a rival camarilla called the " Baglers , " the sketch authors indite . It was during a Bagler attempt in 1197 that the numb human beings was reportedly thrown into the well outside the castle near Trondheim to envenom its water for Sverre and his Birkebeiner shielder .
" They took a dead humans and cast him into the well , and then take it up with stones , " the translated saga say .
Scientists returned to the site of the buried medieval well at Sverresborg Castle to take samples for the new analysis.
It ’s possible that the bones in the well were not those of the dead human race from the saga , but carbon 14 dating shows that he die at the same time , the study author wrote .
" While we can not try out that the remains recover from the well inside the ruin of Sverresborg palace are those of the individual mentioned in Sverris Saga , the circumstantial evidence is uniform with this conclusion , " they spell .
Southern man
The inherited analytic thinking indicate the adult male from the well probably had blue eyes and blond or light - brown hairsbreadth and that he had the typical blood line of citizenry who grew up in the southerly Agder region .
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However , the Agder area seems to have been a fastness of the Baglers , so it ’s now unnamed if the drained human being was from the Birkebeiner or Bagler army , the study authors indite .
University of Stavanger archaeologist and historianRoderick Dale , a specialist in Old Norse literature who was n’t involved in the new study , consort that the analytic thinking seemed to bear out the result described in the saga . But he noted that " Sverris Saga , " like many of the King ’s Sagas , was " more propaganda than history . "
" As such we might consider it in the same way we might approach a modern politician ’s autobiography , " Dale told Live Science in an email . " It is not a history per se , although it deals with diachronic events that happened in the life of the author . "
