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Monday, February 5, 2018

The British Chancellor descends from a Swiss mummy

Por G_nkerbell

The body of the female was discovered when remodeling work was done on the church of Barfüsser, in northern Switzerland. He was buried in front of the altar, so it can be determined that she was in a position that showed privilege, and in addition, she was dressed in high quality clothes. It can be said that she was a wealthy woman from Basel. But the reasons why he was in a state of mummification were not clear. In addition, at the time of the discovery of the body, the problem of identification began, as there was a tombstone that indicated his name and the first clue that the team of scientists managed to obtain was that the wood of the coffin that contained it dated from the 16th century.

Currently archaeological techniques have advanced a lot, so it has been possible to make unexpected and surprising discoveries. Now, a new discovery astonishes the world and especially Great Britain, since more than three decades of research, a team of Swiss scientists finally found the identity of a mummified woman who was found in a church in Basel in 1975 .

And now, when finally discovering who was the aforementioned female, they also found a novelty in their tree, as the woman is an ancestor of the British Chancellor and also former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The lady, according to studies, had died of syphilis.

The body of the female was discovered when remodeling work was done on the church of Barfüsser, in northern Switzerland. He was buried in front of the altar, so it can be determined that she was in a position that showed privilege, and in addition, she was dressed in high quality clothes. It can be said that she was a wealthy woman from Basel. But the reasons why he was in a state of mummification were not clear.

In addition, at the time of the discovery of the body, the problem of identification began, as there was a tombstone that indicated his name and the first clue that the team of scientists managed to obtain was that the wood of the coffin that contained it dated from the 16th century. Some time later, in the middle of the analysis, they found another novelty, because the remains of the woman were full of mercury, and this explained that the body had been mummified and preserved after death.

Also, those remnants of the liquid metal were revealing, since they were a reference to the fact that the lady had submitted to what in the 15th and 19th centuries was the standard treatment for curing the horrible wear caused by syphilis, although those methods usually resulted more lethal that healing. But, even with the information about the probable cause of his death, the identity of the female found remained a mystery.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city of Basel was a rich commercial city, because its port on the River Rhine was a key center for moving goods through Europe. Therefore, when consulting with local historians, the scientists were able to understand that there were many members of wealthy families in the city who buried them inside the Barfüsser church and also in its surroundings. Likewise, most of those who were buried in that place were indicated in documents, or described on their tombstones. But not the mummified woman.

It was only in 2017 when it was possible to obtain a detail that led to advance the investigation, because reviewing the church's papers, it was discovered that the mummy had already been found in 1843 and that detail made the team arrive at the theory that the mummy was a member of a wealthy Basel family, the well-known Bischoffs.

Also over the years, scientists were able to obtain more information through DNA analysis, by obtaining genetic material from the mummy's toe. Likewise, with the theory in their hands they worked independently and compared their DNA with that of the descendants of the Bischoff family. The results were clear, there was a 99.8 percent chance that the descendants and the mummy belonged to the same maternal line.

This led to historians and scientists reaching the same conclusion, the mummy was Anna Catharina Bischoff, born in Basel in 1719 and died there in 1787. It was also known that she had seven children, of which two survived childhood, one of they, a woman named Anna, married in turn with Christian Hubert Baron Pfeffel von Kriegelstein. Several generations later, Marie Luise von Pfeffel was born, who married Stanley Fred Williams.

And the daughter of the two of them, Yvonne, is the paternal grandmother of Boris Johnson, the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom.