For the question of what happened during the expedition’s final weeks, the identification adds a small piece to a very incomplete picture. Fitzjames’s remains at NgLj-2 establish that he died there, that he died before at least some of the other men at the site, and that his body was processed in the same manner as those of expedition members of lower rank. Douglas Stenton’s observation that rank was not the governing principle in the expedition’s final days is a reasonable inference from this evidence, though the specific dynamics of the camp at Erebus Bay remain undocumented.
For the science of ancient DNA identification, the successful extraction of a Y-chromosome profile from a 175-year-old Arctic tooth is a methodological demonstration of what is currently possible. The combination of the preservation conditions — Arctic cold, dental structure — with the specificity of the genealogical research that identified Nigel Gambier as the right comparative sample produced an identification that would not have been possible with earlier DNA technology or without the particular historical research Tetteroo had done on Fitzjames’s obscured family history.
For the Nunavut research community and for the Indigenous communities of the Arctic whose ancestors encountered the Franklin expedition and whose oral accounts described its end, the 2024 and 2026 identifications are part of a longer process of documenting what the land holds. The 451 bones from NgLj-2 represent at least thirteen people. Six have been identified. The remains of scores of other expedition members have never been found. The process of identification, dependent on finding living descendants willing to provide DNA, is ongoing.