These questions, which were genuinely unanswerable from the bones alone, were precisely the questions that a then-new scientific method was beginning to address in the early 1990s.

Ancient DNA analysis — the extraction and sequencing of genetic material from ancient human remains — had been demonstrated as a viable technique in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The initial work was limited by the technology of the era: the amount of genetic material that could be recovered from ancient bone was small, the methods for distinguishing authentic ancient sequences from modern contamination were still being developed, and the range of genetic markers that could be reliably analyzed was narrow.

But even within these limitations, ancient DNA offered something that osteology could not: a biological window into the individual’s ancestry, expressed not in bone morphology but in the molecular record of inheritance that is encoded in DNA.