The following is an excerpt.
The Iliad—Homer’s story of the Trojan War, and the battle between Agamemon and Achilles—is one of the oldest examples we have of Western literature. But when was it actually written? To answer that question, you might turn to a historian or a literary scholar. But geneticists wanted a crack at it, too.
It turns out that tracing the evolution and history of a book is a lot like tracing the evolution and history of a people or language.
View the original article here: Geneticists Try to Figure Out When the Illiad Was Published