I have watched a movie “The Lost King”. It is a story based on a true story, in which how Philippa Jayne Langley discovered remains of King Richard the 3rd. It is a story for ordinary people, or people of some matters who have dreams in their lives, no matter how faded their real lives are. There are some fictions inserted to Ms. Langley’s circumstances, including “very British” (also it is true to say “very academic”) descriptions, but the appealing of this story is not faded. The analyses of mitochondrial DNA are sound because it is not a situation of geological time scale but a situation of historical time scale, in which rapid neutral evolution is required for the meaningful analyses. It is also true that transgenerational analyses are easier for maternal mitochondrial DNA than nuclear DNA with sexual exchanges. Furthermore, it is easy to obtain enough amounts of samples from old bones. Of course, there are other strong archeological evidence that support the remains were from Richard the 3rd. Richard the 3rd is found under the “R” mark in the parking place. It is a kind of a surreal situation which reminds me of a drawing of Soseki Natsume’s novel “Kokoro”. In the drawing, the main character’s teacher falls down in the front of his friend K’s tombstone, on which the character “K” is directly engraved. Of course he has a name in more detail, but he appears merely as an initial “K” in the teacher’s story. So, the artist of the drawing drew such a surreal drawing. Almost nobody thinks “R” is a grave mark of Richard the 3rd!
