When a large number of human skeletons were excavated from an old well in Ajnala town of Punjab in early 2014, some historians believed that these skeletons belong to the people killed in riots during the partition of India and Pakistan. The other prevailing belief was these were skeletons of Indian soldiers killed by the British army during the revolt of 1857 in the Indian freedom struggle.
While the identity and geographic origins of these soldiers have been under intense debate due to lack of scientific evidence, genetic analysis of the remains studied by scientists of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Birbal Sahni Institute, Lucknow, Benaras Hindu University (BHU) and Punjab University's anthropologist J.S. Sehrawat has now established that these skeletons are of people from the Ganga plain region.
Researchers took 50 samples for DNA analysis and 85 specimens for isotope analysis to establish the roots of these martyrs.
