![]() ![]() This was a breakthrough, but it still wasn’t good enough to work on a database. The concentration levels of autosomes in the human cell tend to be much lower than those of the mitochondria, and so Li and Austin were able to obtain only 50,000 SNPs, of which 16,000 were usable. These databases require sequences of from 500,000 to 2,000,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”). There are more than 20 such databases, 23andMe and Ancestry being the largest. However, to identify Somerton Man using DNA databases, we needed to go to autosomal DNA-the kind that is inherited from both parents. ![]() The received wisdom of forensic science at the time held that the hair shaft would be useless for DNA analysis without the hair root. She thus secured the soft, spongy hair roots as well as several lengths of hair shaft. She was then able to pull out single strands without breaking them or damaging the plaster matrix. In 2012, with the permission of the police, Janette used a magnifying glass to find where several hairs came together in a cluster. At the University of Adelaide, I had the assistance of a hair forensics expert, Janette Edson. No luck.Īs the death mask had been molded directly off the Somerton Man’s head, neck, and upper body, some of the man’s hair was embedded in the plaster of Paris-a potential DNA gold mine. We published these images, together with many isolated facts about the body, the teeth, and the clothing, in the hope of garnering insights from the public. Later, we obtained another reconstruction by Michael Streed, a U.S. He used a suite of professional AI tools to create a lifelike reconstruction of the Somerton Man. Then, in 2020, we approached Daniel Voshart, who designs graphics for Star Trek movies. We tried several methods to reconstruct its original appearance: In 2013 we commissioned a picture by Greg O’Leary, a professional portrait artist. First was a plaster death mask that had been made six months after the man died, during which time the face had flattened. We engineers in the 21st century had several other items to examine. A trail to nowhere, one of many that were to follow. ![]() But Thomson hadn’t seen him since 1945, he was very much alive, and the last page of his copy was still intact. Early in the investigation, she told the police that she had given a copy of the Rubáiyát to a lieutenant in the Australian Army whom she had known during the war, and indeed, that man turned out to own a copy. Were they related?Īnd yet the attempt to link Thomson to the body petered out. This condition, found in a very small percentage of the population, is often congenital oddly, the Somerton Man had it, too. I discovered a possible clue: Thomson’s son was missing his lateral incisors, the two teeth that normally flank the central incisors. Interviewers then and decades later reported that she had seemed evasive after her death, some of her relatives and friends said they speculated that she must have known the dead man. The Somerton Man problem posed a broader challenge.Īlso scribbled on the back cover was a telephone number that led to one Jo Thomson, a woman who lived merely a five-minute walk from where the Somerton Man had been found. These other projects yield to one or another key method of inquiry. More recently, we’ve been throwing some natural-language processing techniques into an effort to decode the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th-century document written in an unknown language and an unknown script. We tried using the same method to confirm authorship of Biblical passages. My students and I usedĬomputational linguistics to identify which of the three authors of The Federalist Papers-Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay-was responsible for any given essay. Throughout my career, I have always been interested in cracking mysteries. In the late 2000s, I began working on the Somerton Man mystery, devoting perhaps 10 hours a week to the research over the course of about 15 years. The problem nagged many people over the years, and eventually it took hold of me. This was a man with an athletic build, wearing a nice suit, and showing no signs of having suffered violence. These speculations aside, the idea that a person could simply die in plain view and without friends or family was shocking. This line of thought was strengthened, a few months later, by codelike writings in a book that came to be associated with the case. Perhaps the man was a spy who had come in from the cold 1948 was the year after the Cold War got its name. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which found no match. The man’s fingerprints, taken after autopsy, were sent to the U.S. Policemen recovered the man’s suitcase from the Adelaide city railway station and examined its contents. The place on Somerton Beach where the man was found dead is marked with an X. ![]()
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