The DNA evidence eliminated the ambiguity that human testimony had created and could not resolve. DNA does not negotiate between two sincere but contradictory recollections. It does not weigh credibility. It produces a result from biological material that is either consistent or inconsistent with a given relationship.
The 1994 results were inconsistent with the Anastasia relationship. Unambiguously.
The courts had reached a different kind of truth than the science reached — not a factual determination of who Anderson was, but a procedural determination that the evidence before them was insufficient to decide either way. The courts were right, by the standards of the evidence available to them. The DNA evidence then settled, by different means and with different standards, the question the courts could not answer.
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## The 2007 Discovery and the 2009 Research
In 2007, a team of amateur archaeologists working near Ekaterinburg, approximately 70 meters from the site of the 1991 grave, found additional bone fragments. Analysis confirmed that these were the remains of two individuals — a male and a female — consistent in age with the missing children: Alexei and one daughter.
The discovery meant that all eleven individuals killed in the July 1918 execution were now physically accounted for. There was no biological void into which a survivor could have fit. Whatever one believed about the probability of escape, the remains were now found.
The 2009 research paper by Coble and colleagues, published in PLOS One under the title “Mystery Solved: The Identification of the Two Missing Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis,” reported the comprehensive results of the analysis of both the original 1991 grave remains and the 2007 finds. The identification used Y-chromosome STR testing (which allowed comparison of the male remains with known male-line Romanov relatives, including Prince Andrew Andreevich Romanov), nuclear STR analysis, and mitochondrial DNA.