There are no photographs of Hans Jonatan. This unidentified man may have been a former slave Universal History Archive/Getty Images

It’s not exactly bringing back the dead but it’s close. A person’s genome has been partially pieced together from fragments of his DNA found in hundreds of his modern-day descendants. It is the first time a dead person’s genome has been reconstructed without DNA extracted from their remains.

The person in question is Hans Jonatan, who is something of an icon in Iceland. His fame was bolstered by a biography, The Man Who Stole Himself. …