back about 1800 years in this city, and furthermore, it s uncontested. no other city claims the connection to peter that the city of rome does. but for centuries physical evidence proving peter came to the eternal city eluded scholars, but in the 1940s, everything changes, when beneath the vatican archaeologists discover the bones of an ancient man. - even our competitors - so you can be confident you re getting the right flight at the best price. kayak. search one and done.
order to disprove that claim. the vatican believes that further scientific investigation is unnecessary because these remains have been authenticated. but ever since the bones were discovered, margherita guarducci s work has come under intense criticism. there are a couple of problems with guarducci s claims. one is the graffiti. so there s this graffiti on a wall. it s truncated, which means it s shortened. we don t know how it finishes. guarducci says that it reads peter is here, but other scholars have said, well, it could actually say that peter is missing. i think part of margherita guarducci s story was that she wanted very much to find peter, and she brought great expertise but also that desire, and when you put those two things together you have a risk, a risk of maybe exceeding or going beyond the evidence.
there s no disputing that these traditions were very, very strong. we have literary traditions. we have archaeological evidence. we have this graffiti. we have material culture. so we have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but we don t have anything that ties us back to the exact time and place which we would really need to say definitively that peter was here in this place. it s controversial, but could science now provide that missing evidence? professor tom higham and dr. georges kazan are relic hunters from oxford university. they aren t allowed access to the bones found beneath the vatican, so they ve tracked down two teeth, believed to come from peter, to a basilica in tongeren, belgium. dr kazan thinks the relics were brought here from rome in the 7th century. oh, look, there are the teeth, there, look, just there, two of them. so there s a latin inscription that says, dua
peter s basilica continue to dig the archaeologists as they dig down discover a full street of tombs, an avenue within the ancient necropolis, and they discover that it leads towards the high altar of st. peter s. beneath the high altar, the archaeologists discover what appear to be the bones of an ancient man. so everyone is enormously excited because this is a tomb, and everyone including the pope thinks perhaps this is peter. the vatican decide to enlist the help of an anatomical expert from the university of palermo. the experts from the university of palermo are much less certain. they concluded that the remains are those of three people, one in fact a woman and the remains also include those of animals as well.
340 ad, so it s old, but it s not as old as st. peter. so if it s not st. peter the apostle, georges, then who is it? it may be a simple case of mistaken identity. there was another martyr called st peter who died in around 304, so it may well be a relic of st. peter just not st. peter the apostle. oh, well, that would certainly fit with the date. however, this doesn t get us any closer to resolving the great mystery of whether st. peter actually visited rome. or what the status of the vatican bones is? exactly. for that, we really need to actually go and sample that material. but with no access to the bones found beneath the vatican, it s impossible to say definitively if peter really came to rome. for many, it remains a historical mystery. it s not impossible that peter did make the journey to rome, but there s not enough