A fun question I was thinking about: If I were able to go back in time to 1948 and ask the coroner if it might be possible identify the mystery man by finding people related to him by using microscopic hereditary information extracted from a few of his hairs, would the coroner agree that it might be <i>theoretically</i> possible far in the future, or would he think I was a nutcase?<p>It wasn't until 1952 that DNA was confirmed to be the carrier of hereditary information[1]. Would an average (educated) person in 1948 even suspect that such a thing might be possible, or would it sound like crazy science fiction?<p>I wonder what astounding forensic techniques will emerge 50 years from now that might be applied to solve present day mysteries. Probing people's brains—living or dead—to directly extract memories? What else?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experiment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...</a>
> “My feeling has always been that it’s been suicide, that Rubaiyat was known as a kind of suicide handbook,” Bilsborow said.<p>This caught my eye as a Persian. I have never known this book to be a kind of suicide handbook! On the contrary there are many famous poems in this book about happiness, living in the moment and not worrying about past or future.<p>Maybe there are different interpretations of the poems in circulation elsewhere or something happens to them in translation.
Nick Pelling's initial thoughts on this (from yesterday): <a href="https://ciphermysteries.com/2022/07/26/somerton-man-identified-as-carl-charles-webb-but-mystery-still-intact" rel="nofollow">https://ciphermysteries.com/2022/07/26/somerton-man-identifi...</a>
I recommend this post on the/r/UnresolvedMysteries subreddit for more context and commentary: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/w8eu1i/somerton_man_identity_solved/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/w8eu1i...</a><p>It's interesting that he turned out to be Australian. Almost every theory I read assumed he was a foreigner.
This was second episode of Casefiles podcast: <a href="https://casefilepodcast.com/case-02-the-somerton-man/" rel="nofollow">https://casefilepodcast.com/case-02-the-somerton-man/</a>