The site is the largest and oldest shipwreck found and was said to hold the remains of Greek trading and artifacts, it is located off the island of Antikythera.
Advertisement
If they’re successful, this could yield insight into the lives of the people aboard the ship and their people.
“Archaeologists study the human past through the objects our ancestors created”, Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist with Woods Hole, said in the statement. “With the Antikythera shipwreck, we can now connect directly with this person who sailed and died aboard the Antikythera ship”.
The Antikythera Shipwreck was first discovered in 1900 by Greek sponge divers.
The prize find was the Antikythera Mechanism, a device from the 2nd-century BC that is sometimes called the world’s oldest computer.
It doesn t look like bones that are 2 000 years old Brendan Foley an underwater archeologist at Woodshole Oceanographic Institution in MA and co director of the excavation told Nature. The skeleton was found buried under around half a meter of pottery sherds and sand.
“It doesn’t look like bones that are 2,000 years old”, he told Nature.
We don t know of anything else like it he said.
The remains include a parts of a skull with three teeth, long bones from the arms and legs, and several ribs.
It is considered that the remains are of a young man. The bones are stained amber red by the corroded iron objects that surrounded them.
Considering they have laid on the sea floor for over 2,000 years, the bones are very well preserved, giving scientists hope that they will be able to extract DNA for the first time from an ancient shipwreck victim. But, as this was a particularly large ship, the victims may have been trapped below decks when their ship sank.
With DNA analysis, the researchers will be able to know vital information about victim’s age and familial heritage and also, better unveil what exactly happened with the ship.
Laden with luxury items, the ship was probably traveling from Greece to Rome, say historians. But DNA analysis is required to confirm the identity of the skeleton.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a 2000-year-old human skeleton at the same Mediterranean shipwreck that yielded the most sophisticated piece of technology, a clockwork, to survive Antiquity.
Advertisement
If enough DNA is extracted from the bones, it could help shed light on the ethnicity and geographic origin of the people who were aboard the ill-fated ship.
