The Romanov Bones Revisited

In 1998, a team of forensic scientists analyzed the DNA in some bones taken from a mass grave in Yekaterinburg, Russia, compared it to DNA from Prince Philip's blood, and announced that the skeletons were almost certainly those of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and three of their daughters. Conspiracy theorists were apoplectic.

Last month, as the London Telegraph reports, a team of Stanford researchers called the 1998 findings into question. Conspiracy theorists the world over are very happy.

I don't know enough about the science involved to be able to say anything intelligent about the two studies, but--even if the Stanford research is correct--I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that any of the Romanov children survived.