Amelia Earhart is legendary. She was the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean and might have been the first to fly around the world if her plane had not vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Since then, her death has been shrouded by mystery. But a new scientific study claims that bones found in 1940 on the Pacific Island of Nikumaroro belong to Earhart, despite a forensic analysis of the remains conducted in 1941 that linked the bones to a man. The bones were revisited in a study, “Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Bones” by University of Tennessee professor Richard L. Jantz. The bones were uncovered by a British expedition exploring the island for settlement after they came upon a human skull. After a more thorough search of the area, several other bones and a part of what appeared to be a woman’s shoe were also discovered. Jantz said there was suspicion at the time of the discovery that the bones could belong to Earhart, but that forensic osteology was still in its early stages. So Jantz co-developed a computer program that estimated sex and ancestry using skeletal measurements. He compared the lengths of the bones to Earhart’s measurements, using her height, weight, body build, limb lengths and proportions, based on photographs and information found on her pilot’s and driver’s licenses, according to The Washington Post.
“In the case of the Nikumaroro bones, the only documented person to whom they may belong is Amelia Earhart,” Jantz wrote in the study, according to The Post. Theories involving Earhart landing on Nikumaroro have emerged in recent years.
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