how does 55 generations equal 17000 years?
With regard to work like this, they aren't connecting 55
consecutive generations. I doubt the Blackfeet would have known the White Man would discover DNA and so did not know to save samples from each generation.
Instead it is done with known DNA samples from the past and mathematical models that supposedly determine how likely it is that two samples separated by multiple generations are related. There is a large amount of hand waving and voodoo involved and a lot of the results are influenced by what the people involved
want there outcome to be.
The article was written by an imbecile so tough to tell, but it seems that the company's models made connections from this guy back across 55 DNA samples from the past, which they probably pulled out of a shared database somewhere.
