An enduring mystery of the medieval period is that of the identity of the so-called Moorish Woman, whose remains were unearthed beneath a carpark in 2007. The woman, written about in 11th century sources, was said to have usurped the place of the King of the English, Harold Harefoot, during a strange period of societal upheaval that befell England and the wider world.
And in this time did cometh a light across the kingdom and in the streets was much chaos, and a curse of tongues did afflict the people, and many did babble and clutche at themselves. Husbands and wives became as if strangers. In Wessex, a maiden birthed a goat and a goat birthed a babe. Men lost their wits, and animals escaped their fetters and ran amok.
In the court, whither had the King stood, stood a rare beauty, comely in appearance yet of strange hue and countenance, clothed in the King’s vestments and with his holy crown upon her dark head. This changeling, speaking words of deceit, was placed in scold’s bridle lest she cast another spell upon the lands, and her body beheaded and burned at first light, and the witch’s bones cast into yon pit, though this did not undo the devil’s work upon the land.
Modern analysis of the remains raised more questions than it answered. The scholars of her time had ascribed this ‘witch’ the most exotic origin they knew of, claiming her to be from North Africa. Exhumation of the bones and DNA analysis confirmed that truth was far stranger than fiction - the DNA belonged to a young, South East Asian woman of the Khmer Empire, now modern day Cambodia.
How a Khmer woman came to appear in a European court some ten thousand kilometres from her birthplace, in a country then unknown in the East, is a mystery so confounding that many of the scientific explanations are no less fanciful than the ancient accusations of witchcraft.
One man who thinks he has the answer is Anton Paul, publisher of the book A Great Shift Is Coming, in which he makes the extraordinary claim that this woman was indeed King Harold himself, his physical form exchanged with a woman on the opposite side of the globe. Furthermore, according to the theory, the king was merely the most visible victim of a far reaching calamity. Anton posits that as high as 0.3% of mankind was afflicted during a radical shift, their bodies and minds cast to the winds and rearranged, a sort of musical chairs of flesh operating on a global scale.
Anton cites studies of maternal haplogroups to back up his crackpot theory. “You’ve got native American DNA appearing in Australia, almost a millennia before the two populations met! Polynesians in India! It’s as though something picked everyone up and jumbled them around the map. And it’s not the only time it happened! 855! 1040! 1321!! Every few centuries humanity is rearranged, and we’re long overdue for another one. I’m telling you, you’d better be ready for it, because when the next shift comes, it's not going to be minor.”
The professor has been unable to expand upon the mechanisms underlying his supposed bodyswapping event, and has been widely denounced by his peers.