"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said. The study mostly affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.C. The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the "Iliad" was compiled, so the paper, published in the journal Bioessays, won't have classicists in a snit. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. His collaborators include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and Andreea S. The researchers accept the received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War - if there was such a war - with Greeks battling Trojans. The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer - if there was such a person - probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. (ISNS)-Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written. This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service.
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