Dr Fisher's casebook Glorious summer

摘要

In 2012, England was greatly occupied by the discovery of a skeleton buried underneath a car park. This was thought to be the remains of King Richard III, also known as Richard Crookback, regarded as the last king of the medieval period and the last Plantagenet. I do not know whether the rest of the UK was so concerned; he was not king of Scotland or Ireland, and to Wales he was a foreign overlord. But it was an interesting and exciting discovery, nonetheless. I was reminded of the story this summer, while listening to The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 (9 July; bbc.in/32PK4Gr). Dr Turi King, archaeologist and molecular geneticist, and a member of the team that uncovered and identified the skeleton, was being interviewed, during which I heard the phrase, "we did a Bayesian statistical analysis".