The 73-year-old from Lead, South Dakota, has expressed relief after this revelation.
“I feel this DNA research is another way of identifying my lineal relationship to my great-grandfather,” said LaPointe.
The new method was developed by scientists led by Eske Willerslev, director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Cambridge.
“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.