"Ancient 'Two Brothers' mummy mystery solved" Topic

Experts at the University of Manchester in the U.K. have solved a 4,000-year-old mystery about a pair of mummies dubbed the 'Two Brothers.'…

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Very cool. Thanks.

So that brings up a question. The article says that inscriptions indicate they were sons of a local governor. But DNA shows they had the same mother and different father.

Was it known to the local governor that one was not his son??!!

Since the ages aren't indicated in the article, it's possible that one could have been the son of a previous husband of the mother, perhaps who died, and the second was the son of her new husband, the governor. The first would have been adopted.

But in ancient times there was a practice whereby if a prominent man died, his wife would be married to a younger brother, whose offspring with the wife would be counted as the son of the deceased first husband (On a side note, this is the actual Biblical "sin of Onan," which was a case where Onan had to marry his brother's widow, but did not want to give her any sons, as that would mean his brother's estate, which he now controlled, would instead become the estate of the children. Thus, Onan's sin actually was using birth control to deny his brother a legacy and steal the inheritance, not the euphemism applied today.)

Or, she could have been pulling the old "Potiphar's wife" bit and canoodling with the hunky young butler.

Lots of possibilities. Pick your favorite!

Good points Parzival. The nominal father may have assumed that both sons were his.

I prefer the hanky panky explanation.
After 4000 years, Jerry Springer!

Having the same mitochondrial haplotype doesn't make them brothers. A large number from the local population could have the same mitochondrial haplotype M1a1. How many of their chromosomes matched? The study didn't look at these. All that has been proved is that they are not of the same paternal line.

Druzhina
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