The identification’s significance is appropriately modest in the sense that it does not resolve the large historical questions about the Franklin expedition. We still do not know what navigational decisions brought the ships into the worst of the Victoria Strait ice rather than through the more navigable southern route. We still do not know what Franklin’s last months were like or the specific circumstances of his death. We do not know the content of whatever journals and official reports the expedition’s officers kept during the two and a half years they were beset in the ice. We do not know, and may never know, the specific sequence of deaths and decisions at the Erebus Bay site and along the march route more broadly.
What we know, as of the September 2024 announcement, is that one of the men who made those decisions in those circumstances was James Fitzjames, that he died at Erebus Bay, and that the physical evidence preserved at the site documents, among other things, what happened to his remains after his death. That knowledge, modest as it is against the larger questions, is nonetheless real and documented in ways it was not before.
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## The Paleo-DNA Laboratory and the Technical Infrastructure of Identification
The specific laboratory that extracted the DNA from the Fitzjames molar — the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario — is one of a small number of specialized facilities worldwide with the particular expertise and infrastructure required for ancient DNA work.
Ancient DNA laboratory work operates under constraints that do not apply to standard forensic or clinical DNA analysis. The fundamental problem is contamination: modern human DNA is everywhere — on the surfaces of specimens, in the air of normal laboratory environments, on the hands and instruments of researchers who handle specimens. Because the ancient DNA in a specimen may be present in very small quantities and in highly fragmented form, even small amounts of modern DNA contamination can overwhelm the ancient signal and produce results that appear to come from the specimen but actually reflect the genetic material of the people who handled it.