It's always good stuff coming from the Mary Rose, the Tudor ship that sank on 19 July 1545. It was recovered in 1982 and offered a wealth of amazing late medieval wares, including clothing, buckles, weapons, etc....but it also has some of the remaining crew.
Ninety-two nearly complete skeletons were found, as a matter of fact, and it is well documented that archers were on board serving as guards. These fellows mostly came from Wales and southwest England. Longbowmen were particularly trained and skilled to handle the mighty bows, often at a pull weight of 200 lbs.
A museum at Portsmouth was specially built to house the ship and its artifacts,and scientists there want to look at these skeletons to see the realtionship of their activities in life to how their skeletons developed.
According to a story from BBC News:
Nick Owen, a sport and exercise bio mechanist from the College of Engineering at Swansea University, said: "This sample of human remains offers a unique opportunity to study activity related changes in human skeletons...These archers had specialist techniques for making and using very powerful longbows...It is known that archers were on board as 'arm guards'. But they don't know which skeletons they would be...So we are analysing the lower arm bones as those are the ones that are likely to show a difference," he said. "In fact, on one of the skeletons we have looked at, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and elbow is 48% larger than on the joint on the other arm."
For more details on the story, go here. And the Mary Rose museum site here.
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