Miklós Kásler - Zoltán Szentirmay (szerk.): Identifying the Árpád Dynasty Skeletons Interred in the Matthias Church. Applying data from historical, archaeological, anthropological, radiological, morphological, radiocarbon dating and genetic research (Budapest, 2021)
CHAPTER SEVEN – Genetic investigations
and six markers for the skeleton of Anne of Antioch. The differences occurred primarily with bone samples with less intact structures, or in the case of markers with long alleles. Three markers were only investigated at the Göttingen laboratory, one marker only at Budapest, and in the case of several markers only one of the laboratories obtained acceptable results (Tables 8.1, 8.2 and 9.1, 9.2). According to 12th-century burial customs, only royal persons and their family members were buried inside the Royal Basilica of Székesfehérvár, with immediate family members placed next to each other whenever possible (Figure 13). This archaeological observation raised the possibility that skeleton II/52_3, which was buried earlier, could be an Árpád Dynasty King and be closely related to King Béla III. By collating the A-STR data determined via PCR from the laboratories in Göttingen and Budapest, we were able to compile a marker set with consensus alleles. The comparison made with consensus alleles indicated that there were not any shared alleles between the two skeletons in the case of 5 markers out of 20 (Table 10). This contradicts the hypothesis of a fatherson relationship. Instead, the grandfather, Béla II (the Blind), or the father’s two brothers, László II and István IV, could be considered (Olasz et al. 2018). The possibility of burial next to the uncles has very little support among historians for the following reasons: László II and István IV were pretenders, and thus it is unlikely that Béla III and his wife Anne of Antioch would have been buried next to them. It was also found that out of the five different chromosome markers, in the case of at least three, the molecular structure of the region where a given marker was located interfered with the detectability of the A-STR marker, and we also had to account for 145
