What the study did not establish: The study did not prove biological parentage in the way a standard paternity test proves a parent-child relationship. Paternity tests achieve certainty levels of 99.9% or higher because they are comparing two people who are expected to share roughly fifty percent of their variable genetic material — a relationship close enough to produce an unmistakable statistical signal. At three generations of remove, the proportion of shared DNA is much smaller, and the statistical signal is weaker. The probabilistic method used in this study provides support — consistent with the claimed relationship — but the nature of that support is probabilistic rather than certain in the way a direct kinship test is certain.
Published accounts of the study do not report specific probability figures, match statistics, or confidence intervals. The prompt for this article correctly notes that the full statistical details of the analysis — the specific methods, the comparison group size, the match thresholds — would require access to the full paper’s methods section, which was not fully accessible during the research process for this article. What the public-facing reporting on the study does consistently say is that the results “confirmed” or “supported” the relationship, and that the researchers themselves characterized the finding as confirmation within the limits of what the method can show.
What Professor Willerslev said in public statements was precisely calibrated: the genetic analysis “provides an additional line of evidence to strengthen his claim.” That framing — an additional line of evidence — acknowledges that the DNA result is one piece in a larger evidentiary picture that includes documentary records, oral history, ceremonial knowledge, and the Smithsonian’s own lineal-descendant determination made years before the study.