Two Stillborn Babies Were Buried With Tutankhamun. The Autopsy Found Who Their Mother Was

Two Stillborn Babies Were Buried With Tutankhamun. The Autopsy Found Who Their Mother Was In a small painted wooden box, set into a wall niche of the Treasury room of Tutankhamun's tomb, an English archaeologist found two miniature coffins of beaten gold. Inside the gold coffins were two smaller coffins of gilded wood. Inside those, two embalmed female fetuses. One had died at five or six months of pregnancy. One had died at full term. For eighty-eight years nobody could put a name on their mother. In two thousand ten a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association pointed at one. In this video, I open the case file on the two fetuses Howard Carter's team catalogued as 317a and 317b, on the older textbook reading that gave the larger of them congenital diseases the bone never carried, and on the headless female mummy in tomb KV twenty-one whose partial DNA the JAMA team flagged as the leading candidate for their mother. The case is not yet statistically closed. It is also not what most retellings make of it. If a body in a different tomb returns a fragmentary maternal DNA signal consistent with two royal stillbirths and the dynastic record allows only one named candidate to fill the line, would you sign identity or would you write the line open? I read every comment. The findings discussed here reflect a re-examination of published forensic, archaeological, and pathology literature on a historical body or case. Where the published record is contested, the alternative reading is named. New evidence supersedes old conclusions, including any made on this channel. Third-party footage used for commentary and criticism under Fair Use. #AncientForensics #Tutankhamun #Ankhesenamun