When professor Robin Coningham's youngest son, Gus, was 5, he was asked at school what his father did. "He works for the Buddha," said the boy. Which led to a bit of confusion, recalls Coningham.
But it turns out Gus was not that far off the mark. Last week it emerged that a team led by Coningham, a professor of archaeology and pro-vice chancellor at Durham University in northeast England, had made a startling discovery about the date of the Buddha's birth, one that could rewrite the history of Buddhism.
After a three-year dig on the site of the Maya Devi temple at Lumbini, Nepal, Coningham and his team of 40 archaeologists discovered a tree shrine that predates all known Buddhist sites by at least 300 years.