The ancestral remains stored in museums and research institutes seem to be the quintessential example of a problematic collection inherited from colonial and apartheid eras. “Undoing Empire” (Rassool 2015) implies the reburial of the remains, but also the establishment of a dialogue with descendants, and other academic and political actors, around the research to be carried out (or not). By focusing on several case studies of ancestral remains from Southern Africa (Abraham and Stuurman families of Sutherland, Sarah Baartman, and Cornelius Kok II), and of networks of experts mobilized around them (paleogeneticists, forensic anthropologists, archeologists, public historians, etc., from Germany, South Africa, the UK and the US), I attempt to understand “the production of certainties” (Latour 2002) about technologies, vocabularies, and classificatory systems to be used in order to restore the social histories of indigenous bodies. I'm particularly interested in the moment when genetic testing becomes the “supreme scientific benchmark”, and genetic laboratories - the locus of the search for the answer to an intractable question: to whom to give back ancestral remains? My research is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork conducted in France and South Africa (since 2010), on more recent research conducted in the US (since 2023).