【Obsession Archives】

If Ric Gillespie can’t find Amelia Earhart’s bones,Obsession Archives it’s likely no one will.

The bones suspected to be Earhart’s -- found on the desolate island of Nikumaroro in the Pacific Ocean in 1940 -- haven’t been seen for over 70 years. And at this point, Gillespie, the executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, doesn't hold out much hope for recovery.

After the bones were carefully measured and analyzed by a British doctor in the region, they disappeared.

SEE ALSO: Bones found on an island in 1940 are '99 percent' likely to be Amelia Earhart's

“The bones probably kicked around for a few years until they got in someone’s way and they probably just pitched them out,” Gillespie, who is also the author of Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance, said in an interview. “They didn’t receive any kind of dignified burial.”

“I don’t hold a lot of hope that those bones are going to show up,” he admitted. Gillespie says he’s made 12 expeditions to far-off Nikumaroro, also known as Gardner Island.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Even if there's little hope of recovery, hunting for the bones still could be worthwhile.

Locating the bones would be a great boon in determining if they truly belong to the brazen, pioneering pilot and could provide proof that she landed on a remote beach before succumbing to isolation and starvation.

But even though scientists can't study the bones first hand, researchers still have enough information to make new discoveries thanks to the detailed measurements of the skeleton documented by the British doctor.

Last week, Richard Jantz, professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and former director of the university’s Anthropological Research Facility, plugged these measurements into a modern computer program and determined the bones “have more similarity to Earhart than to 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample."

The results are the best evidence yet that the bones belong to Earhart -- although complete certainly is still elusive.

“There’s a greater likelihood now that it’s Amelia Earhart -- but you can’t firmly say that this is who it is,” said Peer Moore-Jansen, a biological anthropologist at Wichita State University who played no role in Jantz’s research, in an interview.

How could such valuable bones have been lost?

The science of forensic anthropology is carried out with extreme care and diligence.

Today, “bones don’t disappear like that,” said Moore-Jansen. But 80 years ago, the ethics and laws regarding bone discoveries were quite different than they are today.

“You’re basically talking apples and oranges,” he said of the different time periods. “I would say it would be highly unlikely that something like that would happen today.”

Still, even today, ancient bones are sometimes lost.

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“I’ve seen many things that have disappeared in museums,” said John Verano, a biological anthropologist at Tulane University who specializes in skeletal anatomy, in an interview. "Who knows where they go.”

Verano has had the unfortunate experience of finding “skulls rotting in boxes” in the outdoor part of a museum in Peru -- at an establishment he chose not to name. So, sometimes bones are literally just left to rot away.

Amelia Earhart flew over the Golden Gate Bridge with navigator Fred Noonan at the outset of their first around-the-world flight attempt, in 1937. Credit: Getty Images

But, from the outset, the bones thought be Earhart’s had challenges other than neglect. The bones were found in the remote backwaters of the western Pacific British Empire in 1940, where there weren't many -- if any -- forensic experts around.

“In the 1940s you had a huge number of eloquent anthropologists,” said Moore-Jansen. However, Moore-Jansen noted, there probably weren’t any anthropologists living in the remote, tropical Pacific; they couldn’t pick up the bones, study them, and store them properly.

“Sometimes it’s just a matter of what you’re able to handle,” said Moore-Jansen.

It seems that there was also another powerful factor at work hindering scientists from learning about the telltale bones. This factor was named Sir Harry Charles Luke, who served as Britain’s High Commissioner for the Western Pacific at the time.

Sir Harry wanted to keep the discovery a secret. British-U.S. relations were delicate at the time, and the commissioner didn’t want these bones, potentially of the famed Earhart, to become a distraction. There were greater concerns: Nazi Germany was bombing London, and the U.S. wasn’t helping (yet).

"Thinnest rumours which may in the end prove unfounded are liable to be spread," Sir Harry wrote in 1940.

So the bones were given to a physician who concluded that they belonged to a stocky man -- not a lanky woman. The case, it seems, was settled. The documented measurements were stored away, and the bones soon lost. With the physical evidence gone, the notion that Earhart landed on Gardner Island became something like a myth.

“It was a rumor that almost no one believed,” said Gillespie.

If the old bones were found, how could they help?

The bones are likely degraded -- from both exposure to heat, humidity, and natural decomposition on tropical Gardner Island along with the many decades that have since passed. But they could still hold some valuable DNA.

Gillespie’s organization has a cotton swab of saliva from one of Earhart’s descendants, so DNA from a bone -- if a decent genetic sample were extracted -- could be compared to an Earhart relative.

“The probability for DNA gets better every year,” said Verano. “If it’s preserved enough they could get long fragments to see statistically if it’s a match.”

DNA from a cell’s nucleus is most ideal, said Verano, but another sort of DNA that's found inside thousands of cellular organelles called mitochondria, could be of great value, too. Mitochondrial DNA is hardier than nuclear DNA, though it's not quite as precise, as it preserves only the maternal line.

Via Giphy

But even just getting ahold of the degraded skull could allow for an expert forensic anthropologist like Jantz to nearly “cinch it,” said Verano. An analysis “could say this is consistent with a woman of European ancestry,” said Verano.

The appearance of a European women's bones here -- in the middle of nowhere in Polynesia, on an island that hasn’t been inhabited since 1892, and in the region Earhart happened to be flying over -- could serve as quite compelling evidence.

Yet, we’ll likely never have 100 percent certainty, even if the bones are found.

“I think the boat has sailed on that,” said Moore-Jansen. “But we can find the best estimate.”

For now, Gillespie fears the bones may be gone for good. But some lost bones, like Earhart's, can turn up again.

“They could be in a closet somewhere,” said Verano.

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