A Bare Bones History Lesson
Soon after the British raised Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, from the ocean bottom off the Isle of Wight in 1982, scientists found one whole group of human remains that had extra deposits on a small bone at the tip of their shoulders which had also become forked. The anomaly indicated that the men had been longbow archers, their bones deformed by habitually drawing back and holding the taut bowstring, and showed how heavily defended the king’s conveyance was....