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## The Broader Scientific Implications
Beyond the specific case of Ernie LaPointe and Sitting Bull, the scientific team that published the 2021 study emphasized the broader potential of the method they had developed.
The core innovation was the ability to extract usable genetic information from highly degraded ancient samples and apply probabilistic relatedness analysis to confirm family relationships at the level of a great-grandparent — three generations of remove. Previous ancient DNA methods had worked reasonably well at shorter genealogical distances but struggled with the statistical challenges of more distant relationships in degraded material.
Willerslev pointed to several potential applications in his public statements about the study:
For other historical figures, the method opens the possibility of confirming or testing claimed relationships between living descendants and famous individuals from the past. He mentioned Jesse James and the Romanov family as examples — cases where questions about identity, lineage, and remains have remained partially unresolved. If sufficiently old samples of biological material can be found, and if living individuals with claimed relationships are willing to provide comparison DNA, the probabilistic relatedness method provides a tool that did not previously exist.
For forensic work, the ability to analyze very limited and degraded DNA samples — extracting meaningful genetic information from what was previously considered too damaged for analysis — has potential applications in cold cases, disaster victim identification, and the analysis of old biological evidence that has been in storage.
For the broader field of ancient DNA research, the development of probabilistic methods that work with low-coverage degraded data expands the population of historical samples that can be meaningfully analyzed, potentially allowing researchers to ask genealogical questions about individuals from the more distant past whose remains have survived but whose DNA is fragmentary.