A SYMBOL OF NEW WOMANHOOD

n March last year, an announcement was made that seemed to clear up a mystery that, despite persisting for the best part of a century, had lost none of its potency. The journal claimed that an assortment of bones found on the eastern Pacific island of Nikumaroro in 1940, including a skull, were “a 99 per cent match” for those of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator who had become the world’s most famous missing person when she disappeared — along with her navigator, Fred Noonan — on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to circumnavigate the equator in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra. Alongside the bones were a woman’s shoe, a navy tool used by Noonan, and a bottle of the herbal liqueur Benedictine — apparently Earhart’s airborne beverage of choice. The original analysis had concluded that the bones were male, but Fordisc, a computer forensic anthropology programme, now posited that the remains belonged to a “taller-than-average woman of European descent” (Earhart