Slashdot Mirror
How Tutankhamun's DNA Became a Battleground
First time accepted submitter superboj writes "Everyone wants a piece of Egypt's most famous pharaoh, including the media, the Muslim Brotherhood and even the Mormon church. But while scientists have been trying to excavate his DNA and prove who he was — Egypt's turbulent politics have been making progress hard. Will experts be able to make a major discovery? And what happens if they do?"
Is he - or is he not - related to Steve Martin?
It's interesting how "important" this pharaoh is. He died really young. Realistically, his greatest historical accomplishment was simply not having his tomb raided by treasure hunters.
It's amazing how much bullshit is happening around this corpse. The Mormons want to identify if it was one of their ancient ancestors so they can posthumously baptize him. There's some kind of fear that he may have been a Jewish ancestor. Which would somehow make Egypt part of Israel. Then the geneticists are arguing over the validity of DNA testing of mummies. And the most bizarre thing is from some fuzzy screen captue of a computer monitor that was filmed in one of the Discovery channel documentaries. Since they won't release the data, some group is claiming that the screen capture proves that king Tut was actually Caucasian. Which has some Aryan group in a frenzy. And now with the mess in Egypt, further studies have been put on hole. It's like a bad 3000 year old joke.
FYI: The "Mormon Church" as you describe it is actually a team at BYU that specializes in genetic identification of family relationships. One of their geneticists is one of the top in the country and to date, they have identified a number of unknown mummies who have been floating around various museums. They have also built a genetic family tree. There is all sorts of things one can learn about ancient Egypt this way. (For example, just because historical records say that two people are related, it doesn't mean they are genetically.) The BYU team has no interest in it from a religious perspective. King Tut wouldn't provide any additional "religious" information than the other 30+ mummies they have already worked with. They are very interested in it from a scientific perspective which is another way of saying that they are curious as all scientists should be.