DNA testing proves South Dakota man is grandson of famed Native American Sitting Bull

Using a new method of analysing family lineages with DNA fragments from long-dead people, a group of scientists have figured out that a South Dakotan man was indeed the grandson of the 19th-century Native American leader Sitting Bull.

Researchers took a strand of hair from which was being preserved at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Through this hair, they were able to establish a familial relationship between the famed Sitting Bull and Ernie LaPoint of South Dakota.

The 73-year-old from Lead, South Dakota, has expressed relief after this revelation. He says this has come as a piece of good news as several people had been questioning his relationship with his ancestors for years.

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"I feel this DNA research is another way of identifying my lineal relationship to my great-grandfather," said LaPointe. "People have been questioning our relationship to our ancestor as long as I can remember. These people are just a pain in the place you sit - and will probably doubt these findings, also."

This study is not only a milestone for LaPointe but is also a scientific marvel as this was the first time that a familial relationship has been established between a living man and a historical figure with the help of DNA of a long-dead person.

The new method was developed by scientists led by Eske Willerslev, director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Cambridge. It had taken the researchers 14 years to develop this new method of extracting usable DNA from hair.

When Willerslev read about LaPointe handing over hair of Sitting Bull to Smithsonian, he reached out to him to conduct this research. "LaPointe asked me to extract DNA from it and compare it to his DNA to establish relationship," said Willerslev, senior author of the research published in the Science Advances. "I got very little hair and there was very limited DNA in it. It took us a long time developing a method that, based on limited ancient DNA, can by compared to that of living people across multiple generations."

Sitting Bull, whose Lakota name was Tatanka-Iyotanka, was known for leading Native American warrior who then wiped out federal troops of George Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn.