Copernicus (Not The Crater)

Researchers seem to have found the physical remains of Nicholas Copernicus, the Polish priest who argued Earth orbited the Sun, not the other way around, which was the orthodoxy in Europe at the time. Samples of DNA taken from the bones and teeth of a skeleton in an unmarked grave in Poland matches that taken from a hair found in a book known to have been owned by Copernicus.

If historians put the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance, and perhaps more specifically at the first voyage of Columbus to the west in 1492, the great work of Copernicus, published after his death because of his fear of the reaction of the Church, stands as a turning point in the intellectual development of modern Western civilization.