A 73 year-old Lakota Sioux man, Ernie Crowfoot LaPointe, was challenged on his relation to Sitting Bull for years. Sitting Bull was the Lakota Sioux chief and warrior known for defeating General Custer’s army at the Little Big Horn in 1876.
However, scientists out of Cambridge, UK investigated Sitting Bull’s lineage thanks to a two-inch lock of hair. They turned to an autosomal DNA test method that looks at a person’s entire genome. The test used his hair and compared it to saliva samples from several living Lakota Sioux people to search for a match. As it turns out, Ernie is Sitting Bull’s great-grandson.
You can read more about the study here.