A Tudor warship sank almost 500 years ago. The bones of his crew show what life was like

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Well-preserved bones found from the wreck of an English ship shed light on what life was like for the crew of the ill-fated Mary Rose and offer surprising information about changes in bone chemistry that could benefit modern medical research.

The Mary Rose was one of the largest warships in the Tudor fleet during the reign of King Henry VIII until she sank on July 19, 1545 during a battle with the French. Hundreds of people were trapped on board when the ship sank in the Solent, the strait between the Isle of Wight and mainland Britain.

In 1982, the ship’s hull, its artifacts and the bones of 179 crew members were recovered from the Solent and brought to the surface. The building and its collection of 19,000 objects are on display. Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, and research into the remains is ongoing to uncover aspects of the crew members’ personalities and lifestyles.

Researchers analyzed the collarbones of 12 men aged 13 to 40 who died on the Mary Rose to see how their work on the ship may have affected the chemistry of their bones. The team also looked for telltale signs of aging and evidence of the hand, or which hand the crew members naturally preferred.

The study results were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS OneThe study’s findings may contribute to a better understanding of age-related changes in our bones.

“Increasing our knowledge of bone chemistry is critical to understanding how our skeletons age and how medical conditions affect bone,” said study lead author Dr. Sheona Shankland, a research fellow at Lancaster Medical School at Lancaster University in the UK.

“Understanding these changes may allow us to be more informed about fracture risk and the causes of conditions such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis that typically occur with age.”

The Enduring Mystique of Mary Rose

In 1510, a year after ascending the throne, Henry VIII signed a request to add two new ships to the royal fleet. The Mary Rose was one of them, and this flagship became the king’s favorite.

The ship saw action against the French at Brest, France in 1512 and was lost in her final battle during a major invasion by the French fleet in 1545. drown.

“Regardless of the cause, she flipped to starboard and water entered through the open gun ports,” said study co-author Dr Alex Hildred, head of research and curator of ordnance at the Mary Rose Museum.

“With few access points between decks and a heavy network spread across the open upper deck, 500 people were trapped on board,” Hildred said. “Those on the upper decks of the fore and aft castles or on the rigging were the only survivors.”

Hildred helped lead underwater excavations, including the discovery of the largest concentration of human remains from the wreck, and she has contributed to bone research ever since.

Despite being underwater for hundreds of years, the remains are remarkably well preserved because a layer of sediment that settled over the ship created an anoxic environment, said Shankland, who will begin teaching at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in November. .

“The nature of this environment means that the sailors’ remains did not decompose in the way that would be expected from most archaeological discoveries, allowing us to reliably examine the chemistry of the bones,” she said.

Right hand preference

Shankland was interested in the idea of ​​studying clavicles, or collarbones, left over from shipwrecks because the bones exhibit unique characteristics associated with age, development and growth.

S-shaped bones are one of the first bones to form in the human body, but are the last to fully fuse—usually between the ages of 22 and 25. They play a crucial role in attaching the upper limbs to the body, and the collarbones are one of the most commonly fractured bones, says study co-author Dr Adam Taylor, director of the Clinical Anatomy Training Center and professor of anatomy at Lancaster University.

The research team used Raman spectroscopy, a non-destructive technique that preserves valuable samples, to study the bones, Shankland said.

This method uses light to reveal the chemical composition of a sample. The team analyzed how light reacted to molecules inside bones, and changes in the color of the light allowed the researchers to identify specific substances.

Bones are made up of a balance of minerals and proteins. According to Shankland, minerals give bones stability, strength and rigidity, while protein gives them flexibility and resistance to fracture.

The analysis showed that the balance of protein and minerals changes with age. The mineral composition of bones increases with age, and the protein content decreases. The changes were most noticeable in the right clavicles, indicating that crew members had a preference for the right hands, but they may not have had a choice.

“Because people of the time were forced to be right-handed because left-handedness had negative associations in medieval England, we could assume that this difference in the right side was due to right-handedness,” Shankland said by email.

At the time, left-handedness was associated with witchcraft, so crew members relied on their right hands and put more stress on their right sides during repetitive tasks on the ship, Shankland said.

Understanding the relationship between the hand and impacts to the collarbone is critical. When people fall, they typically extend their dominant arm to break the fall, one of the most common ways to break the collarbone, Shankland said.

“This suggests that handedness influences the bone chemistry of the clavicle, which provides important current insight into fracture risk,” Shankland said. “These findings expand our understanding of the lives of Tudor sailors, and also contribute to current scientific research aimed at better understanding changes in bone chemistry and potential links to age-related skeletal diseases such as osteoarthritis.”

The study provides new insight into the Mary Rose’s crew and how their occupations in Tudor England shaped their bodies and bones, said Richard Madgwick, a professor at the School of History, Archeology and Religion at Britain’s Cardiff University. Madgwick was not involved in the current study but had previously examined other aspects of the remains.

“The biomechanical aspects of these strenuous, repetitive tasks have long been understood, but the chemical variations and contrasting changes in mineral and protein components are much less well understood,” Madgwick said by email. “The research has implications far beyond the Mary Rose – its new high-resolution technique provides a new approach to obtaining information about people’s lifestyles, activities and stresses suffered in the past, crucially, without any destruction of invaluable archaeological finds.”

New discoveries

Every time researchers study the crew’s remains, they gain new information, e.g. varied background some crew members.

“The fact that this research is making a tangible difference today, nearly 500 years after the ship sank, is both remarkable and humbling,” Hildred said.

Shankland then wants to study the remains of the archers aboard the ship to see if their spines show any signs of the unique movements they made. Archers used longbows that required a huge rotation of the spine when drawing the string back.

“This means that one side of the spine experiences more repetitive stress during predictable movement, so changes in the spine will not be symmetrical,” Shankland said. “Studying the impact of this on the spine will allow us to better understand changes in bone chemistry with age, as well as under the stress of physical activity.”

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