Dr. Dennis Van Gerven, a professor of anthropology, and his graduate student assistant, Paul Sandberg, used fragments of skeleton to create a biological profile of an Anglo man of Ruess' age — he was 20 when he vanished — and approximate height.

Van Gerven said Thursday that DNA comparisons of Ruess' bones with four nephews and nieces, the deceased man's closest living relatives, left no doubt about the remains.

Jones suggested the DNA was too degraded for analysis, but Van Gerven said that degraded DNA is incapable of indicating any kind of match.

"What we are being treated to is a shotgun approach where every conceivable — and, in this case, inconceivable, assertion is being made in the hope that something will eventually stick," Van Gerven said in a lengthy e-mail answering each of Jones' doubts.

Krauter said the rounded teeth found on a lower jaw bone were consistent with a gritty diet Ruess was likely to have shared with Navajos and preparing and eating his own food in the sandy outdoors.

Teeth can wear quickly, said Van Gerven, who spent six months as a youth in the Sahara Desert, where he "lost more enamel than the Ruess skeleton! That didn't make me a Nubian and it didn't make me 70 years old."

Van Gerven said the "great fuss" Jones made over shovel-shaped incisors had little scientific importance. Eight percent of European-Americans possess the same trait, he said, while 10 percent of American Indians lack it.