Confirmed: Ernie Lapointe is a great-grandson of the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull. Says a new method that uses fragments of ancient DNA to analyze family lineages . In fact, this is the first time that using ancient DNA, more specifically the hair of Sitting Bull, a family relationship between someone alive and someone long dead has been confirmed.
The revolutionary method has been developed by a team of scientists led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the Lundbeck Foundation Center for Geogenetics and what it does is look for autosomal , non-gender-specific DNA in genetic fragments extracted from a body sample. The autosomal DNA that each person inherits comes half from the father, half from the mother. This means that genetic matches with an ancestor can be verified whether it belongs to the maternal or paternal family.
In Lapointe’s case, DNA samples from his and other Lakota Sioux were compared with autosomal DNA from Sitting Bull’s scalp . The result, which has been published in the journal Science Advances , is that Lapointe is the great-grandson of Sitting Bull and his closest living descendant.
This novel technique can be used when the genetic data available is very limited , as in the case of Sitting Bull, and involves the possibility of doing similar DNA tests to verify that other long-dead historical figures have living descendants. It would also serve to answer important questions based on ancient human DNA that has previously been impossible to analyze because it is considered too degraded, for example, in forensic investigations .
“In principle, you can investigate whoever you want, from outlaws like Jesse James to the family of the Russian tsar, the Romanovs. If there is access to ancient DNA, usually extracted from bones, hair or teeth, they can be examined in the same way”, Willerslev said.
Scientists have taken 14 years to find a way to extract usable DNA from the 5-6 cm strand of Sitting Bull’s hair. The hair was extremely degraded, having been stored for more than a century at room temperature in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington before being returned to Lapointe and her sisters in 2007.
The technique employed differs from traditional approaches to DNA analysis, which look for a genetic match between the specific DNA on the Y chromosome transmitted by the male line or, if the long-dead person was female, the specific DNA in the mitochondria transmitted from a mother to her offspring. Neither is particularly reliable, and in this case neither could be used, as Lapointe claimed to be related to Sitting Bull on his mother’s side.
Tatanka-Iyotanka, better known as Sitting Bull (1831-1890), led 1,500 Lakota warriors at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, killed American General Custer and five companies of soldiers. The blood-soaked feat, also known as “the battle of the greasy grass ,” symbolized Native American resistance to white man’s expansionism. Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 by the “Indian Police”, acting on behalf of the United States government.
