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Colby Cosh: New answers about the doomed Franklin Expedition

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A quartet of Canadian anthropologists published two papers this week that provide remarkable new detective insights into the fate of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, which saw 134 men set out in search of the fabled Northwest Passage only to vanish in the High Arctic. Both papers are products of the 21st-century genetics revolution — the equivalent of solving cold cases by matching DNA recovered from old human remains with samples from living descendants.

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In one of the new reports, human bones from Erebus Bay on King William Island, at a site within walking distance of the twin wrecks of the expedition’s icebound ships, have been positively........

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