Professor Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist with the Stanford University School of Medicine, has developed a technique using which there are chances that the geographic origin and ethnic background of the three African-born slaves may be found whose skeletons were found in 2010.

During a construction project on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean, the skeletons, two men and a woman were unearthed. Due to unavailability of the written record, their geographic origin and ethnic background could not be found.

The new technique allows the extraction and analysis of DNA from even very contaminated and damaged samples. There are chances that this technique may provide researchers a way to better understand the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Bustamante affirmed, "Through the barbarism of the middle passage, millions of people were forcibly removed from Africa and brought to the Americas". The project has helped them know that they can not only get ancient DNA from tropical samples, but also they can identify their ancestry.

The skeletons were between 25 and 40 years of age when they perished in the late 17th century. Researchers said that the way their teeth had been filed were of the pattern that were found in some African tribes. But for them, it was the sufficient identification.

Using the new method, Bustamante and his team found that all the three slaves might have arrived on the same slave ship, but genetic differences have been found that indicate that they came from different populations within Africa.

The woman and one of the two men had likely originated from non-Bantu tribes and the other man came from northern Cameroon. Study's co-author Maria Avila-Arcos said that they might have spoken different languages.

Hannes Schroeder of the University of Copenhagen said that the findings explain genomic data can be used to find out the genetic ancestry of long-dead and poorly preserved individuals.