We begin our study of world history, and our search for the forces of destiny that shape its progress, with a hypothetical question. Let us say that the anthropology department of a major university decides to study the legal profession in the United States during the nineteenth century. The researchers want to investigate the lives of these lawyers and their physical and genetic characteristics.

Here is the question. In order to gather as much information as possible, researchers want to exhume some lawyers and take DNA samples from their skeletons being that DNA in bones is preserved for centuries. There is even some discussion about exhuming Abraham Lincoln. Should they be given permission in the interests of scientific research?

The very thought seems scandalous. Where is respect for the dead? What gives scientists the right to violate the sanctity of the grave? If these exhumations would lead to a cure for cancer and save many millions of lives all over the world, perhaps we could at least have a conversation about it. But if all they accomplish would be to increase our knowledge of anthropology without saving a single life, no one would even dare contemplate such an egregious violation of human dignity.

And yet, this is exactly what scientists have done. A little over a century ago, archaeologists digging in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt discovered the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen, popularly known as King Tut, who had died more than three thousand years earlier. King Tut’s mummified body was taken from his coffin, along with his golden burial mask and a vast number of funerary artifacts, and brought to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo…

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