Epistemic Injustice in Paleogenomics and the Objectivity of Vox Populi

The development of ancient DNA (aDNA) discoveries and techniques has created a divide between hard scientific evidence and tradition-based (cultural) interpretations in anthropology, reflecting a shift in how we understand human history and evolution. This shift has produced new forms of epistemic injustice — the unjust treatment of knowledge authorities, especially regarding the legitimacy of Indigenous oral traditions and testimony. Following a usage common in critical anthropology, this essay treats such testimony under the broader heading of vox populi — not as undifferentiated popular opinion, but as the collective, community-anchored voice through which Indigenous knowledge is transmitted. This essay will examine how scientific methods in paleogenomics can unintentionally marginalize these non-scientific ways of knowing.

Technological advances in the 2010s led to the discovery of the phenomenon, as famously called by Ewen Callaway, “Bone Bonanza” in anthropological research and, more specifically, in ancient DNA sequencing. More aDNAs were sequenced in 2018 than cumulatively before in human history. This drop in genetic sequencing costs even overtook Moore’s Law.

In the 2010s, the first ancient human genome was sequenced from an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo’s permafrost-preserved hair. As of the end of the year 2025, the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR) of Harvard University released over 10,000 ancient individuals’ genome-wide ancient DNA data. This enormous data collection paved the way for completely new insights into human migration patterns and adaptation to environmental changes.

Only the volume of the genomic data that has been generated in the last decade can be seen as a large pile of trash from an anthropological perspective. There is a risk that arises from the uncontrolled reduction of complex human narratives to just paleogenomic concepts like single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or principal component graphs as the only and absolute truth. This only-data approach deeply ignores the questions that scientists ask about data to understand concepts and relations.

As with other scientific matters, these achievements did not occur in a vacuum in terms of ethicality. It has reignited the long-standing tensions between physical findings on Indigenous bodies and Indigenous history. In the rush of the new methodological capabilities, recent data has been severed from its cultural and descendant context, which reflects a sort of “scientific colonialism,” where these territories are excavated for biological “sources” to boost intellectual capital in the Global North.

The concept of “scientific colonialism” is continuously developing, especially because of the persistent lack of local and global capacities, building a dominant “Southern World.” Whilst the ancient DNA is extensively extracted from the south and “marginalized” societies, their sequencing and analysis are predominantly performed under the control of elitist laboratories of Europe and North America – which altogether creates a Western World. This standardized workflow in paleogenomics creates a data drain where the biological heritage of the Indigenous people is transformed into the knowledge property for foreign institutions of the West.

Data drains are not only biological but also a computational problem. The “Western World” possesses the specialized bioinformatics methodologies, pipelines, and high-performance computing clusters that are necessary for validation and processing of a large volume of data from public sources like AADR. Since the biological data is obtained and stored in the far away servers, it ultimately removes the ownership of the data from the reach of the communities they originally belong to. This sort of “technological gatekeeping” persists a contemporary form of “hermeneutical injustice” – where the essential tools for interpreting the rightful society’s ancestry are held by distant institutions and further expanding the distance between vox populi and its subjects.

This rapid progress created a need to establish certain ethical standards. In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, the British philosopher Miranda Fricker defined epistemic injustice as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower — either when prejudice causes a hearer to give deflated credibility to a speaker, or when a gap in collective interpretive resources leaves marginalized groups unable to make sense of their own experiences. Due to a shift in scientific paradigms, the former and the latter forms of knowing are now separated drastically: the Western world has honored its own as more objective than Indigenous ways of knowing, which it considers highly political. This prejudicial view has systematically downgraded the credibility of Indigenous knowledge systems.

This concept is highly relevant in paleogenomics, as controlling scientific perspectives can diminish the voices and knowledge of indigenous communities. Especially as scientific methods for artifact discovery become more radical, indigenous remains are often treated as discrete objects by discoverers, ignoring their connections to people and communities. Such behaviors reflect colonial attitudes.

Despite all these contradictions, vox populi is not an act of political correctness or a cheap marketing trick for so-called “woke culture.” Purely genomic models, however statistically rigorous, deliver structure without context: they can tell us that populations diverged, expanded, or persisted, but not how those events were lived, understood, or transmitted. That context is supplied by Indigenous oral narratives such as the Heiltsuk Nation’s account of an ice-free coastal corridor or the Blackfoot Confederacy’s claim of deep continuity in the Rocky Mountains — narratives whose accuracy has, in recent years, been independently confirmed by aDNA evidence.

In terms of theory, there are mainly three philosophical bases for such discussion: Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice, Harding’s Strong Objectivity, and Marshall’s Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk).

Fricker distinguishes two forms of this injustice operating along the hierarchy of credibility accorded to a “knower.” The first is testimonial injustice: the case in which a hearer gives a speaker deflated credibility because of prejudice. As for the cases in bioarcheology, when an Indigenous authority claims a “historical activity” that contradicts the skeptical findings, their testimony is often met with a certain level of skepticism. This creates an inevitable deficit in credibility of the Indigenous authority. On the other hand, genomic results (e.g., principal component analysis) are not completely “factual” either; they require an interpretation and involve certain algorithmic biases and statistical limits, like sampling restrictions.

Fricker also defines “hermeneutical injustice,” which arises when a difference in Indigenous statements puts a group in disadvantage when trying to find patterns in the relations and events. This also arises because of the biases of the scientific community, which is generally fed with “recency” of Western narratives of warfare and dominance – ignoring the complexity of ancient social structures. This structural form of injustice is mostly based on the cultural domination of interpretive tools.

Sandra Harding’s “standpoint epistemology” or “strong objectivity” defends that the neutrality of a notion is not objective, or more sharply, even contradictory to itself. She suggests that a scientist cannot be detached from the society he/she/they live in. To overcome this, she defines “strong objectivity,” which says a marginalized observer sees a system (and its parameters) and/or an event more whole than a dominant (e.g., a god-level neutrality) observer, even able to. Thus, the addition of vox populi and marginalized thoughts enhances the empiricality of outcomes of paleogenomics.

For the initial two concepts, a framework of “Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk)” is formulated by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall. It advocates for using both perspectives of Indigenous knowledges and statements, as well as the strong perspective of Western knowledges and ways of knowing – ultimately for the benefit of all. This view rejects the integration model, which states that Indigenous knowledge cannot be (or merely) validated by scientific methods. Etuaptmumk justifies the potential coexistence of both ways of seeing things and yields to the prevention of “epistemic violence.”

The exponential increase in ancient DNA research has paved the way to its own critiques. These critiques were mostly on its methodology as a so-called “vampiric science” – which defines the concept as devourer of the Indigenous discourses with the aim of producing genomic data for the non-Indigenous careers.

Firstly, the methodology of ancient DNA research itself is subject to discussion. It requires direct or indirect destruction of human or societal remains. This is because the petrous part of the human inner ear yields to a marginally higher endogenous DNA content than other skeletal remains. Despite the reversible ways that are still being developed, the destructiveness of the research is still present. This disadvantage of the modern practices is viewed as a spiritual violation by the Indigenous communities, which see their ancestors as sentient beings rather than old and inert subjects. This clash between biological efficiency and cultural sensitivity yields problematic relations between scientific communities and the descendants of the people of remnants, which could later yield a lack of permits for the sampling of new biological materials from old sites from contemporary Indigenous people of the lands.

Scientific rationale that justifies the destruction of the heritage objects with the pursuit of gaining novel insights and knowledge contradicts with the Indigenous belief of bodily integrity and repatriation. This stowing of skeletal remains by large laboratories around the “Western World” has increased the tension between the scientific community and Indigenous communities as a result of the creation of aDNA biobanks that remain outside the control of descendant communities.

Theory and narrative building using these genetical information from the remains is defined as “scientific colonialism” in the literature. The results of these processes by Western universities are used to make political decisions about the “colonies” without their actual interactions with the concept. In response to this, the concepts of “Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS)” and “Indigenous Data Governance (IDG)” started to be used across research fields and by individuals both who are part of the research and in the context of the research.

In a Nature Perspective article of 2021, a group of archeologists, anthropologists, curators, and geneticists from 31 countries took an initiative to define five globally applicable guidelines to define a milestone in ancient DNA research: In the beginning, researchers must ensure all the widespread regulations are strictly followed both in the locations of research conduction and where those human remains originate, based on a well-designed and transparent research plan that is done prior to the initiation of the study. As the research progresses, researchers must take all necessary actions to minimize the possible physical damage to the human remains. They must be handled with appropriate and standardized methods. After the publication of the study, researchers should make the raw data and findings available for everyone and permit everyone who wants to critically reexamine the contents and inferences. Eventually, as a base for all of these, they must engage with the Indigenous people from early stages to the late stages of the study, whilst maintaining respect, sensitivity, and responsiveness to their perspectives.

These implementations are not only a bureaucratic time waste but also a way of navigating such complex relationships that creates a gap between the researcher and the rightful owner of the research material itself. They are quite dynamic in terms of where they are to be implemented. Since every region, country, and society has its own parameters, both in social and political contexts, such practices will have different effects and sometimes side effects that would also affect the progression and result of the studies.

This dynamic nature can both be problematic and advantageous in its respective context. It can be problematic because the data scientist’s analysis is not always a result of the mindset that scientists themselves use to criticize raw data. Therefore, there will be an inevitable bias in terms of identification, classification, and discussion of the outcomes. On the positive side, this difference in the prejudices of the individuals and events can also lead to a certain progression that may arise from the possible dialectic. Results of such a dialectic mechanism would also create a critical perspective to further improve the objectivity and reliability of the concepts that are examined. Such codominance is deeply necessary for multicultural regions for multiple verification of the paleogenomic findings.

In regions where deeply intertwined cultures exist, like in Türkiye, the first guideline that cites the ensuring local regulations has a specific weight since the country’s culture is deeply related to its nationalist identity. If researchers try to ignore local institutional frameworks, they fall into the trap that the Western World once fell into, which is characterized as scientific colonialism in the mask of “orientalism.” This short-term attempt would create long-term problems for both the nation in the subject and the prospects of the paleontological findings of such a rich country in terms of biological data.

While top-tier scientific journals now require certain ethical statements, such statements from Indigenous people are still seen as an unnecessary hurdle for the scientists of international research. With that, the requirements to make raw data from remnants publicly available can also be contradictory for descendant communities who may wish to restrict how their ancestral genome is used in the future and unrelated studies. Incorporation of the concept of “strong objectivity” into the paleogenomic workflows would make peer-reviews process shift with the changing standards of the studies. If these journals were to recognize the voice of the people as a legitimate hypothesis base, then it would not be viewed just as an ethical lapse, but a methodological flaw (as a lack of objectivity and reliability of the research methodology) to not ask the Indigenous people.

Aforementioned theoretical perspectives have played out in the real world, which yielded to paleogenomic and archeological controversies between scientists and descendants of the remains.

In the example of Kennewick Man, which is the foundational text of conflict in the North American paleogenomics, there was a nine-year legal conflict between five local tribes (Umatilla, Yakama, Colville, Nez Perce, and Wanapum) and a consortium of scientists. Remains of the Kennewick Man (later renamed “The Ancient One”) were discovered in 1996 along the Columbia River. The skeleton is dated to roughly 8,500 years, and early craniometric analysis by James Chatters described its features as more closely resembling those of Caucasoid populations than of contemporary Native Americans. In the media, this morphometric claim was inflated into a suggestion of pre-Native European presence in the Americas, placing it in tension with NAGPRA repatriation — a legal process under U.S. federal law that assures the return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to their affiliated tribes or descendants. The Umatilla Tribe stated that they had been part of the American land since the beginning of time and rejected the scientific findings derived from craniometric research. This irrelevance resulted in their request for reburial of the remains.

In 2015, whole-genome sequencing of the remains of Kennewick Man was conducted by Eske Willerslev revealed he was genetically Native American and highly probably related to today’s Colville Tribe, which was one of the claimants. These results showed that the morphological traits of the remains were just a red herring, and therefore a phenotype does not directly map its respective genotype and/or ancestry over a few thousand years ago. It perfectly exemplifies testimonial justice. Because the scientists initially dismissed the Indigenous people’s oral history as a myth and preferred a “flawed” scientific methodology, which was then corrected by the progression in genomic sciences that supported the vox populi.

In a 2017 study that is published in Nature Communications researchers analyzed an aDNA sample from elite burials at Pueblo Bonito, which is located in the Chaco Canyon Historical Park in New Mexico, USA. They have reported a matrilineal (kinship with the female line) dynasty that has lasted about 330 years. While the positive scientific methodology showed a consistent and relevant methodology, the study’s epistemic base has shown an injustice. Oral traditions of the Puebloan people and the ethnographical literature on the subject have described the Chacoan society as a matrilineal clan, confirming the scientific outcomes. Nevertheless, researchers have published their findings as a “novel discovery” that is ultimately derived from the remains at the American Museum of Natural History, without the permission and/or consent of contemporary Pueblo communities.

There is also a case of a Clovis infant, named Anzick-1, was studied by researchers. His remains were dated as 12,600 years old and were ceremonially buried in Montana. It constitutes one of the examples of how paleogenomics can work in a corrective manner against colonialist narratives. Whole genome sequencing of the Anzick-1 showed a strict refutation on Solutrean Hypothesis – which proposes a colonization of the Americas by Europeans during the Ice Age. Anzick-1’s sequenced genome showed a strong genetic similarity with the Asian populations and an obvious ancestry to 80% of the contemporary Native Americans, and no genetic European relation. In addition, the research also showed an early divergence between Northern and Southern Native American lineages in terms of genomic outcomes, also aligning with the Indigenous narratives about the migration events.

Even though the initial obtainment and usage of the remains were problematic in terms of ethics, newly risen genomic findings paved the way for the self-defense of the Indigenous communities against colonial narratives. The outcomes not only ended the everlasting discussion on the subject but also showed the ability of defense of Indigenous tradition instead of rejecting or disproving it altogether.

Scientific progress not only justifies the existing beliefs or thoughts about Indigenous people, but sometimes it can even rewrite the existing narrative in their favor of these people. A great example of this is the Heiltsuk Ice-Free Corridor plot. The oral history of The Heiltsuk Nation describes that there was a certain land that did not freeze during the Ice Age, which served as a refuge for their ancestors. For a long time, Western geology argued that the mentioned coast was buried under large ice sheets. Recent archeological excavations at Triquet Island revealed a hearth dated to 14,000 years ago. This hearth has empirically confirmed the existence of a refugium on the aforementioned coast during glacial times. This convergence showed a relation between Indigenous oral tradition (or vox populi) and archeological evidence. For this case, vox populi showed a precise telling of paleoenvironmental information from thousands of years ago, even before the discoveries of Western scientific methodologies. It shows the Indigenous narratives do not lack accuracy or validity, but only an empirical recognition of their knowledge when building upon or under the scientific outcomes.

Other than the Heiltsuk case, a study on the Blackfoot from 2024 also shows an example of this case. The Blackfoot case represents one of the most methodologically explicit examples of epistemic converse in recent paleogenomics. The study has tested the enduring anthropological narrative that the Blackfoot were relatively recent migrants from the “Great Lakes,” contrary to the Blackfoot Confederacy’s own oral traditions declaring deep antiquity and continuous occupation of the Rocky Mountains since glacial times. Rather than treating Indigenous knowledge as an anecdote or supplementary, the study positioned the oral tradition as a competing explanatory framework to be evaluated empirically.

Genomic analyses from the study identified a previously unknown ancient lineage. This lineage diverged approximately 18,000 years ago. It endured in the region across major climatic and/or environmental changes. Remarkably, these genetic outcomes have been supported by Blackfoot explanations of deep persistence, refuting the hypothesis of a recent Great Lakes migration. The researchers of the article note the genomic data fit with oral tradition, reversing the usual direction of validation in which Indigenous knowledge is expected to conform to scientific narratives. In this case, the vox populi functioned as the hypothesis and aDNA as the test, demonstrating “strong objectivity” in practice. Beyond resolving a regional debate, the study demonstrates that incorporating Indigenous epistemologies not only enhances ethical research practice but also produces more accurate and historically coherent reconstructions of human population history.

These cases do not only show examples just for ethical correctness, but also methodological upgrades as results. Broadening of the percentage of vox populi in paleogenomics research (surely, without completely being unscientific) also increases the “objectivity” and “reliability” of the possible outcomes. A reciprocal validity or coevolution should be standardized and to be persisted upon, since both (oral traditions and genetics) lack some data that the other one has. Complementarily, genomic data can also fill the gaps or fix the problematic narratives that arise from a colonial context.

The exponential progression of methodologies in anthropological and paleogenomic research has made it impossible to defer the question of which epistemological frameworks govern such work. Legitimizing the vox populi of Indigenous communities is not a scientific obstacle but a necessary correction for epistemic balance: a fair and contextually reliable anthropology requires the integration of traditional knowledge with the molecular evidence that purports to describe the same past.

This integration is a remedy for the testimonial injustice that has accumulated in paleogenomics. Its absence would damage both sides of the conflict. For Indigenous communities, it widens the gap between scientific institutions and the descendants whose ancestors furnish the research material, and erodes their standing to govern what is rightfully theirs. For researchers, it foreshortens access to the very materials — remains, preserved tissues, archaeological sites — on which the field depends, by eroding the social and political consent that makes such work possible.

Through the difficult transition from “vampiric science” to a Two-Eyed Seeing model of collaboration, the role of the researcher must shift from detached observer to ethical agent in dialogue with Indigenous interlocutors. This shift supplies the strong objectivity that purely genomic studies lack. As the cases of the Heiltsuk Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy show, the convergence of oral tradition and aDNA does not merely confirm what was already known — it yields a more robust reconstruction of human history, one that withstands scrutiny from both the laboratory and the community.

Implementing Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous Data Governance must therefore become the standard rather than the exception. This ensures that Indigenous biological heritage is not converted into scholarly capital for the Global North but remains under the ownership of the communities from which it derives. The epistemic violence embedded in seemingly neutral scientific practice can be mitigated only when vox populi is recognized as a legitimate hypothesis-generating framework, not a secondary anecdote retrieved when convenient.

In paleogenomics, as in any empirical practice, knowledge severed from its context produces misleading interpretations. Cultural, geographical, and historical knowledge cannot be an optional supplement to ancient genomic workflows; it is part of the evidentiary base on which any honest reconstruction of the human past must rest.