2,000-year-old shipwreck releases human remains from watery grave
The diver wiggled a hand over the debris, watching with anticipation as the sediment of the seafloor scattered. And as the water cleared, what was revealed was unmistakable -- human remains.
Off the coast of the isolated Mediterranean island of Antikythera in Greece lies one of the largest and most puzzling shipwrecks in history. But now the sea may finally be ready to reveal its secrets.
A team of international archaeologists from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have recovered a partial skeleton -- believed to be from a male in his early 20s -- from its watery gravesite about 50 meters (165 feet) below the surface. And researchers hope it could shed light on what caused the ship to sink off of the jagged coastline more than 2,000 years ago.
"It was the first dive on the first day, within three minutes of hitting the bottom and a couple of hand swipes to move away the sediment, long bones appeared and then the skull. It was pretty exciting," Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist with WHOI and co-director of the expedition, tells CNN.
A treasure trove from antiquity
Skeletal remains in situ on the Antikythera shipwreck.
The excavations have yielded a partial skull, including a jaw and three teeth, two arm bones, multiple rib fragments and two femurs.
Foley says that the bones were located on August 31 during the team's second expedition of the season. Archaeologists were already jubilant following a successful exploration in May, which saw the team return with spectacular treasures that included a bronze spear, gold jewelry and glassware.
"The theme here is that steady labor at the site over the last four years has now gotten us to the point where almost every dive is delivering something that is just jaw-dropping," he says with excitement in his voice.
"We are getting these glimpses back to one of the most interesting periods in human history. This moment when the Roman Republic is switching over to the Roman Empire -- really one of the first periods of globalization."
Will DNA reveal secrets of the deep?
Foley affectionately refers to the remains as Pamphilos, a Greek name which translates to "friend to everyone." The moniker comes from a drinking vessel with the same name etched across the rim previously recovered by famed underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau in 1976.
With painstaking care, the team disinterred the latest skeletal remains and brought them back to the surface, where Hannes Schroeder, an expert in ancient DNA from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, had been drafted to evaluate whether there is the potential for DNA extraction.
If viable DNA does exist, Schroeder believes this could point toward some of the answers archaeologists are searching for about the mysterious voyage.
"This is where the DNA can provide some information, because sexing based on the DNA is fairly straightforward," Schroeder tells CNN.
"We could look at the individual's genetic ancestry... and that will tell us something about his or her origins (and) this could be interesting because we know next to nothing about the crew, about the voyage, what kind of people were on the ship. It will give us a little bit of an insight into who were on board the ship that traded across the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago."
Schroeder says preliminary analysis of the teeth, which appear to be in relatively pristine condition with little wear and a robust femur bone, indicates the remains could be from a young man in around 20 years old. He adds that while the femurs, for example, are unlikely to have viable DNA, hope lies in the petrous bone -- a hard section of the skull located behind the ear. He says this is the most likely area to locate DNA, if it still exists.
"(The bones) looked surprising well-preserved for being 2,000 years old and at the bottom of the sea. It's a very rare thing to find something like this."
"That (area) has been shown repeatedly to preserve DNA area than any other skeletal element," says Hannes Schroeder, an expert in ancient DNA extraction.
