That was an amazing discovery.
Twenty years ago, a boy in Arizona picked up an unusual-looking stone for his collection.
On Tuesday, Ramapo College genealogy students confirmed that it was not a stone, but the jawbone of Captain Everett Leland Yeager, a U.S. Marine who died during training in California nearly 70 years ago. did.
The Center for Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) at Mahwah University in New Jersey began working to identify the fragment, which still had several teeth, when police in Arizona turned it over to it last year.
The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office had kept the jawbone since 2002, when the child’s parents turned it in after discovering it was hidden in their son’s rock collection.
“But it wasn’t a rock. It was a human jawbone. For the time being, the bone belonged to the John Doe Rock Collection,” said Ramapo College. said in a release.
Although traditional DNA tracing yielded no results, experts have made some progress with whole genome sequencing to create family tree profiles.
That’s when a Ramapo student and high school intern — the youngest person known to have contributed to the IGG lawsuit — intervened.
In just two days, they identified a “likely candidate” that closely matched the jawbone’s DNA profile. Fortunately, that person was a soldier’s daughter.
Last month, results from a DNA sample taken from his unnamed daughter confirmed that the Ramapo team had cracked the case. The jawbone actually belonged to Jaeger.
The Marine Corps captain died in July 1957 when his plane crashed during a training exercise in Riverside County, California.
At the time of the accident, Yeager’s body was believed to have been completely recovered and sent to his home state of Missouri for burial.
“Because the accident occurred over California, no one knows how the jawbone ended up in Arizona. One theory is that a scavenger, such as a bird, carried it while traveling over Arizona. It was picked up and eventually deposited,” the university said.
The boy’s parents could not tell police when, where or how their son picked up the bones, but authorities said they believe the bones were recovered somewhere in Arizona. Ta.
