bradorsomethingDNA Testing Would Clear Out the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Pretty Fast.
You have to samples to compare to against.
guylacaptiviteThat’s not the point of the tomb.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆DNA doesn’t tell you who a person is without having a sample from a person to compare it to… We’d be able to tell if they were human or not. That’s about it.
Not only that, but afaik there isn’t just 1 body interred there. It’s a whole mess of unidentified bodies buried together.
And the gender. And whether they had chromosomal anomalies
Unless there was a serious mixup, we already know the soldier was one of four randomly selected males.
If you had access to a large genealogical database, it would theoretically be possible to find living relatives, provided at least one of them was included in that database. It may be possible to retrace familial history to determine who specifically it may have been.
That’s more or less how they managed to find the Golden State Killer. Someone noticed that the GSK’s DNA had distantly related DNA listed in GEDmatch’s private database and family trees were constructed to narrow down suspects until only one remained based on timing, location, and other details.
Already has happened.
The tomb would exist with or without bodies being identified. Even if we identified all combatants, there are plenty of other casualties that could deserve similar anonymous respect.
99 Percent Invisible did an interesting episode about exactly this.
The Known Unknown - 99% Invisible
How to honor unidentified remains has always been one of the great conundrums of war. The Romans were fond of honoring them with an empty sarcophagus. After the Civil War, the Union buried 2,111 soldiers in a mass grave in Arlington that they purposely built in the middle of Robert E. Lee’s rose garden. It