Cut to the bone (The Hindu, India)

Description

Some 4,500 years after their death, a young couple created a stir when their skeletons were unearthed from an excavation site in north India. The archaeologists found them lying side by side — the woman with her face up, a single agate bead resting near her collar bone, and the man’s face turned towards her.

A team headed by Vasant Shinde, vice-chancellor at the Deccan College, Pune, and experts from the Seoul National University College of Medicine, South Korea, had been excavating from 2015 the vast cemeteries in Haryana’s Rakhigarhi, one of the largest Harappan sites. They excavated 37 well-preserved skeletal remains and subjected them to anthropological examinations and DNA tests. The results, some set to alter readings of ancient history, are being published in multiple international journals. The discovery of the couple’s grave in 2016 was published in the peer-reviewed journal Anatomy and Cell Biology last September.