Like a dog hair, possibly??
I am thinking of a regular human hair shaft from which only mitochondrial DNA could be extracted.
And this mito-DNA is so unusual that several people could be ruled out.
JMO. Maybe there is no hair shaft, and simply, the previous offenders were lucky that they could be ruled out, even with partial DNA.
Now, if a suspect can not be ruled out with partial DNA, it doesn’t mean that he is ruled in, because the DNA is partial.
In general: how unusual is “unusual” DNA?
My dad’s mito one, in the whole system of 23@me, was matched by one person, his sister. Without her, they said, it was 1:13500.
FTDNA, that did a more profound job, lowered the incidence significantly. Not every match is a match by them, In their whole system, there are two mito matches for dad. One never responded, and the other one told quite a story.
Yes, they were originally exactly from the area my dad was born in. Yes, a tiny religious sect generated there and was removed in 1800 from the area by the government, not to spread the “heresy”. They eventually moved to the US, in 1920es, and the main reason he is speaking to me is because he was an outlier, in a way (left the group).
So imagine that hair had my dad’s mito. How easy would it be to find a match?
Next to impossible, because some of that religious group have been tested, in Ancestry, that is not doing mitochondrial matches.
Moreover, they are very much in their own, sectarians, and don’t like outsiders.
It there is a mito in Delphi case, of the same rarity, a match would mean a lot, but if, say, the incidence of such DNA is 1:20000, people who have it live in a cluster, and don’t get tested, how hard would it be?
