For ten years the two skeletons found in a necropolis of the IV-VI century in central Italy have been known as the "lovers of Modena" , because they were found with their hands clasped, but now it has been discovered that they are two men and it is studied why they were buried together.

When they were discovered in 2009, during excavations in a Modena necropolis of 1500 years ago they immediately became "the two lovers" for the media, but a new study by researchers from the University of Bologna and the University of Modena and Regio Emilia have proven that they are two men thanks to the new revolutionary techniques.

The researcher at the University of Bologna and first author of this study, published in the journal Scientific Reports , Federico Lugli, explained to Efe how the error occurred and the subsequent discovery. "When the bodies were found in 2009, the traditional techniques of skeletal anthropology could not reveal sex due to the poor state of the remains. The media, seeing the intertwined hands, wrote the history of lovers, but at the scientific level it was not never tested sex or degree of kinship, "said Lugli.

In 2017, a very important study for this sector presented a new method capable of defining, from a particular protein in tooth enamel, defining the sex of a skeleton and a team from the University of Bologna decided to apply it to the already famous lovers , adds the researcher. Lugli explains that the method worked in these two bodies, since they had intact dental proteins and it was possible to define that both were male.

The next step, says Lugli, is to understand why they were buried together since at present there is no record of this type of burial during the time and "the various graves with two buried people who joined their hands were always a man and a woman". "We have begun to study the inorganic component of the tooth, which will allow us to know the geographical origin , and we will also apply new techniques to know the DNA that give us more information about both, as if they could be relatives, which is most likely," he added. .

If it has taken about a year for protein extraction and analysis, knowing why they were buried together will be somewhat more difficult.

Has a love story been destroyed? "Unfortunately yes," Lugli concludes, although he explains that it never was because it was built by the means at the time and could not be scientifically denied until today. A very remote hypothesis is that it was a homosexual love since at that time it was not allowed, Lugli adds, and therefore no one could have agreed to bury them together.

Another hypothesis is that they could be soldiers killed together in battle , since the place where they were buried could have been a war cemetery.

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