**Historical identity cases:** Cases where questions remain about who a historical figure actually was, or where competing claims about descent from a historical figure have been made, could potentially be addressed using the probabilistic approach developed for the Sitting Bull study. Willerslev mentioned Jesse James — the outlaw whose death and burial have been disputed, with some claims that the man killed in 1882 was not James at all. He also mentioned the Romanov family, the Russian imperial dynasty, some of whose members’ fates after the 1918 Yekaterinburg execution were uncertain for decades, and where DNA analysis of the remains has already played a significant role in resolving questions about which individuals were buried where.
**Forensic applications:** The ability to extract meaningful genetic information from highly degraded ancient samples, and to apply probabilistic kinship analysis to fragmentary data, has direct applications in forensic contexts — particularly cold cases where biological evidence has been stored for extended periods under conditions that accelerated degradation. If investigators can develop comparison baselines from living relatives and match those against degraded samples, cases that seemed forensically intractable might become solvable.
**Archaeological and population history:** The technical developments in ancient DNA analysis that enabled the Sitting Bull study are not isolated to kinship questions. They expand the population of historical samples that can be meaningfully analyzed for population history and migration research — samples that were previously too degraded to yield reliable genomic data.
The study was described in reporting at the time of its release as a first of its kind. That designation typically reflects both the novelty of the specific case — first use of ancient DNA to confirm familial relationship between a historical figure and a living person — and the novelty of the method applied. Methods described as firsts tend to become standard approaches as the field develops.