by Playfuls Staff |
20th February 2007
Ancient tomes stolen from Poland by 17th Century Swedish invaders hold the crucial DNA key to identifying the remains of Nicolas Copernicus, the first man on earth to argue the sun lay [more] at the centre of what was then perceived as the universe.
In the 1656-1660 war on Poland known as The Deluge, they stole the famed 16th Century astronomer's library of manuscripts from Frombork Cathedral where he is believed to have been buried and where bones thought to be his remains were found in 2005.
Drops of blood on stolen hand-written manuscripts, now residing in Uppsala, Sweden, are believed to be that of Copernicus, possibly from cuts to his fingers caused by his writing quill.
"I hope the stains on the document turn out to be the blood of Nicolas Copernicus - then the entire puzzle will be pieced together and we will be able to confirm whether the bones found in Frombork belonged to this illustrious scientist," geneticist Maria Allen, in charge of the DNA profiling said, quoted by the Tuesday edition of Poland's Dziennik daily.
In 2005 Polish scientists released the picture of a facial reconstruction of a skull believed to belong to Copernicus.
But DNA testing is the only way to determine whether the remains found at Frombork are indeed those of Copernicus.
A Polish-born astronomer, mathematician and clergyman, Copernicus developed the heliocentric theory of the universe which posits the sun rather than the earth at its centre.
The Renaissance father of modern astronomy, he was the first astronomer to insist the earth rotated on its axis once a day and travelled around the sun once a year in his 1530 work On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies.
© 2007 DPA
