The field of ancient DNA has been supercharged in the past few years, some labs are able to process samples very efficiently and in relatively high volumes. There’s a lot of interest in looking at existing source material for examination, with the thinking that it’s easier to test a sample that’s already been found rather than one that’s still in the ground.

So places like museums, university archaeology departments, etc become very interesting in this regard. Repatriation is an outcome here, but in some ways it’s really a possible side effect because these analyses can tell us a lot about lots of topics where data is hard to come by.

In particular, looking at these sources to identify potential ghost populations/novel archaic hominids shows a lot of potential, with the speculation that lots of things have been called things like “Homo Habilis” (which sort of looks like an ‘other’ drawer right now) may actually belong to Denisovans, or be cool finds like the half-Denisovan/half-Neanderthal sample, or things we don’t know about yet.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth here because lots of institutions aren’t exactly rushing out to learn where these things came from when the implications of knowing can be challenging in the current atmosphere, especially since losing the artifacts is a real outcome.

So it’s perhaps a bit of a cop out to throw one’s hands up and say “no labels, can’t know”. Even when a sample is too old to provide ancient DNA, skulls can often be analyzed using things like dental proteomics.

It’s not a guaranteed success every time, but it might be useful to understand what in these collections could potentially be sampled and maybe to figure out a way to go about it, but lots of institutions have a preference toward not knowing if they can help it.