For more than a century, the bones of sailors who joined polar explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition lay scattered on the rocky shores of an Arctic island. Weatherbeaten and bleached, nearly a quarter of the anonymous remains bore the marks of cannibalism, reflecting a grim coda to the famed expedition.
Now, one of those men has been identified as Capt James Fitzjames from London, a discovery stemming from years of study by researchers at two Canadian universities, who isolated his DNA from a single molar and traced it to living relatives.
