Romanov Bones Found?
Almost 90 years after imperial Russia's last tsar was executed with his wife and children by a Bolshevik firing squad, the family may be reunited once more.
Archaeologists believe the newly discovered remains of a boy and a young woman are those of Nicholas II's only son, Alexei, and a daughter, Maria.
Alexei, who was 13 and first in line to the throne, was murdered with his sister and the rest of his family in the basement of a nobleman's house in Yekaterinburg, central Russia, as the pro-tsarist white army approached at the height of the Russian civil war in 1918.
One of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government declared that bones excavated from a Siberian mass grave seven years earlier indeed belonged to the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
A new study, however, is reopening the book.
A team led by Alec Knight, a senior scientist in the Stanford lab of anthropological sciences Assistant Professor Joanna Mountain, argues that previous DNA analyses of the purported Romanov remains - nine skeletons unearthed near Ekaterinburg in central Russia - are invalid. Knight and his colleagues base their claim on molecular and forensic inconsistencies they see in the original genetic tests, as well as their independent DNA analysis of the preserved finger of the late Grand Duchess Elisabeth - sister of Tsarina Alexandra, one of the 1918 victims - which failed to match the tsarina's own DNA. The Stanford team's findings are reported in the January/February issue of the Annals of Human Biology.