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Comment by kmoser | Hacker News Reader

Even more scary: without any living relatives, there would be no way to identify himself with that degree of accuracy. Sure, you can disinter a corpse, but that's bureaucratically way more difficult than performing a DNA test on a live human, and assumes you know where your relatives are buried to begin with.

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> Even more scary: without any living relatives,

I wonder if that is at all possible. Could there be someone alive today who has no blood kin ( father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins 1st, 2nd, etc )?

Everybody has relatives. The question is how distant and whether DNA testing will be useful.

Anyone from an orphanage, for starters.

Not necessarily. Many who grows up in an orphanage has living relatives.

For example many who are in an orphanage has living parents, but the social services and the courts have decided to take them into care for their own safety.

23 and Me was working on a leaderboard of the most isolated people in the world before they went bust

Are fingerprints no longer viable?

Only if there are prior fingerprints to compare them too, which certainly isn't a given.

Or footprints since some hospitals take footprints of newborns, but it's neither a given that they did, or that they're readily available, or that you can identify which hospital to ask, or even that the person you want to identify still has both feet.

Can you use a newborn’s footprint to identify them even as an older adult? If so that truly surprises me.

I wouldn't be surprised if it can be used to say "these are definitely different people", which would be sufficient in this case.

It sounded like Kierans was arrested as a teenager, if so they would have fingerprinted him then.

They didn't know who Kierans was though did they? Woods knew he was someone else, but no one else knew who he was until he confessed.

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