Rob Schäfer, a German military historian told CNN there was a 20 per cent 30 per cent chance of extracting DNA from the remains. They also hope to make facial reconstructions of at least one of the skulls. Scientists hope to extract DNA in a bid to identify the dead. That is certainly the plan, but for now, the remains are undergoing extensive forensic testing in Liège, where Wilkin is based. One of his requests to me was to bury them in a dignified way.” Wilkin said: “At the end of the day he gave me all the boxes to study. Initial tests revealed that the remains belonged to at least four soldiers. “One of the skulls is deeply damaged by a sword or a bayonet, so it was a very brutal way of dying,” he said. Wilkin said he felt a “mixture of surprise and emotion” when he saw the remains. “When he saw the research we released last summer he thought ‘this guy knows about bones and the Napoleonic wars and he works for the government’.” Remains of at least six soldiers, some of whom are thought to have been British, were uncovered by a metal detectorist. Wilkin said of the man, who lives alone: “He suddenly decided he was old and could pass away in the next years and he was afraid of what would happen to the bones. He explained that he ran a “small private museum” at the time and was given the remains for display by a friend who had found them some years earlier.ĭespite being a collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, the man told Wilkin he could not “ethically” bring himself to display the remains, so stored them away in his attic. Credit: Courtesy Bernard Wilkin / AWAP /via CNNĪ few days later, Wilkin visited the man at his home and came face to face with the remains, which the man had had since the 1980s.

They displayed signs of extreme violence. Two skulls were among the human remains discovered in the Belgian attic. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, showed Wilkin pictures of the bones and invited him to his house near the battle field in Plancenoit, where Napoleon’s forces faced off against the Prussians. Last November, Bernard Wilkin, a senior researcher at the State Archives of Belgium, was in Waterloo giving a talk on the process – in which the bones used as a kind of charcoal in sugar purification – when something astonishing happened.Īfter the talk, he told CNN, “this old man came to me and said ‘Dr Wilkin, I have bones of these Prussians in my attic’”. Historians recently revealed that many of those who fell at Waterloo were later dug up by farmers, who sold their remains to the sugar industry for use in the industrial process. While more than 10,000 men are believed to have died during the battle, only two bodies have ever been discovered. Watch the latest News on Channel 7 or stream for free on 7plus >

Fighting for Napoleon by Bernard Wilkin