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Early life - Born in Atchison, Kansas, Earhart and her little sister Grace, whom she called Pidge, were not raised to be "nice little girls," according to the Amelia Earhart Project’s website.

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Early influences -

Earhart saw her first aircraft at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, and her father attempted to interest her to take a flight. But it wasn’t until 1920, when Earhart was 23, that she started taking flying lessons.

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Queen of the air - In 1932, Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo.

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Last flight, first attempt - In March 1937, Earhart flew to Hawaii with fellow pilot Paul Mantz to begin the flight that would have made her the first person of any gender to circumnavigate the globe at the Equator, the earth’s widest point.

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Last flight, first attempt - Earhart, however, lost control of her Lockheed Electra 10E on takeoff and had to send her plane to the factory for repairs.

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Last flight, second attempt - In June 1937, she went to Miami to resume her attempt to fly around the world, this time with Fred Noonan as her navigator.

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Last flight, second attempt - The pair chose to leave important communication and navigation instruments behind for unknown reasons. One theory is that they wanted to make room for additional fuel for the long flight.

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Last flight, second attempt - The pair arrived in New Guinea 21 days later. The next leg was to fly from New Guinea to Howland Island, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

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Disappearance - Earhart was last heard from on July 2, 1937, when she last communicated with a nearby Coast Guard ship. She, Noonan, and her famed plane were never seen again.

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Disappearance and theories - The U.S. Navy conducted a massive search for more than two weeks. Unable to accept that Earhart had just disappeared and died, many of her admirers began to formulate the theory that she was a either a spy or was captured by enemies of the United States.

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Declared dead - Two years later in 1939, the US government legally declared both Earhart and Noonan dead, though their remains were never found.

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The plot thickens - In the summer of 2017, a documentary team with the History Channel unearthed a photo that reportedly showed her in the Marshall Islands. The running hypothesis was that she had survived the crash and stayed in the Pacific.

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The plot weakens again - After the photo surfaced, however, two bloggers found the original photo in a Japanese photo book displaying a date: 1935, when Earhart was around and well. The mystery continued.

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Nikumaroro - In 1940, British officials discovered 13 human bones on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the South Pacific.

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Nikumaroro - It had been three years since Earhart had gone missing. The search party also found part of a shoe, apparently a woman’s, an old-fashioned sextant box similar to the kind she used, and a Benedictine bottle, something Earhart was known to carry.

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False hope - That same year, physician D.W. Hoodless analyzed the bones and determined that they belonged to a short, European man.

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Reexamination of the bones - In 1998, a group of researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery reexamined Dr. Hoodless’s measurements and concluded they could have belonged to a tall woman.

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Reexamination of the bones - Earhart was about 5 ft 7 in or 5 ft 8 in, so hope and interest were reintroduced.

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Searching for bones - In June 2017, the same international group sent an expedition of archaeologists with forensic dogs to Nikumaroro in search of other bones, but it was unsuccessful.

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Earlier searches - In 2001, a previous search crew found possible signs of a castaway, including the remains of various campfires, and US-made items such as a jackknife, a woman’s compact, a zipper pull, and glass jars on the island.

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The working theory - The group suggested that Earhart and Noonan may have landed on Nikumaroro and survived for at least several days, sending distress signals.

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The plot thickens again - Adding to the mystery surrounding Earhart’s story, the bones disappeared after being examined in the late 1990s. All that remains are measurements of the skull, tibia, humerus, and radius.

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Modern science - Richard Jantz, emeritus professor and director of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center, set out to conduct a more in-depth analysis.

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Modern science - Using different investigative techniques, including a computer program that estimates sex, ancestry, and stature from skeletal measurements, Jantz concluded that Hoodless was incorrect in his gender assessment back in 1940.

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His findings - In his published findings, Jantz concluded that the remains have a high statistical probability of belonging to Earhart.

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Findings - In his paper, Jantz wrote that “Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99% of individuals in a large reference sample.”

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Research - Jantz compared the bones' measurements to Earhart’s measurements taken by a seamstress. The document was kept in the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers at Purdue University.

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1929 shipwreck - Jantz also considered the possibility that the bones belonged to one of the 11 British men who died near the island in a 1929 shipwreck. However, no documentation supports this hypothesis. Besides, the 2001 search party found a shoe and other objects commonly associated with women at the site.

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Final verdict -

Jantz determined that “until definitive evidence is presented that the remains are not those of Amelia Earhart, the most convincing argument is that they are hers.”

Sources: (Forensic Anthropology)

See also: The Lindbergh baby kidnapping—America's most notorious crime

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