Cece Moore

Yeah, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude because they couldn't have possibly understood just how valuable that physical evidence was going to be.

I've actually worked cases back to 1958 now.

Whoa.

Yeah, quite a bit before I was even born.

And so it's just amazing what can be done in those cases where the crime scene investigators were so forward thinking.

They collected things they couldn't have imagined how powerful they would be today.

Well, that's a really good question.

I mean, we can analyze ancient remains, right?

When they dig up some old royalty and things or accidentally run into the one under the car park, there's still DNA there.

So it just depends on the environment, how something was stored or where somebody was buried as to how long that DNA will survive.

But it can...

survived for hundreds of years in some cases, even thousands.

I mean, look, they've been able to analyze the genome from Neanderthals.

So DNA lasts a very, very long time, but it absolutely depends on the environment.

Yeah, let me also mention we have one other database that we can use with law enforcement, and that's Family Tree DNA.

The original pioneers of genetic genealogy decided that they wanted to help law enforcement as well.

Now, it is the smallest database.

Unfortunately, even though it was the first one, it's the smallest one.

And so the databases we can use are the two smallest in the field.

That's GEDmatch, which has about 1.5 million people in it, and FamilyTreeDNA that has about 1.25 million people in their autosomal DNA database.