The modern, the postmodern and the possibly post-postmodern: two or three ways of looking at the truth

Perhaps you remember the story of Ariadne, who saved Theseus's bacon when he went into the labyrinth to search for the Minotaur. She stood outside with a ball of thread and handed him one end of it so he could find his way out again. It's essentially the same sort of story as the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. And I often wish, when I start chasing down something or other online, that I had a thread with a loving heart at the other end of it guiding me back to where I started, or had had the foresight to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the deep dark hypertext forest, one that would eventually take me back to the work I'm supposed to be doing.

What brought this on, I hear you cry. It's work, she said piteously; I have here for review a rather funny book called The Coronation, one in a series about a sort of Late Victorian Russian Sherlock Holmes called Fandorin, by Russian writer Boris Akunin. And when I sat down to start writing the review (always a challenging moment), I thought that since the coronation in question is that of Tsar Nicolas II, the last of the Romanovs, I'd better just Google the era first to get a firmer grasp on the Imperial family and its names and dates.

Younguns already look at me uncomprehendingly when I tell them not to trust Wikipedia to be necessarily telling them the truth, so it's only a matter of time before our understanding of what the truth is really does change -- at grassroots level, not just in the staffrooms of besieged Schools of Humanities -- forever. On the other hand, then Wikipedia tells me a story like this about discovering the truth:

Decades later his body was disinterred from the grave in the Cathedral of St.Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg so that a sample of DNA could be taken from the remains to see whether skeletal remains allegedly belonging to his older brother, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, were legitimate or not. The DNA sample obtained from the remains was an exact match with those obtained from the remains of Nicholas II. Beyond the grave, George had once again proved to be of service to his brother. After the completion of DNA testing, the remains of Grand Duke George Alexandrovich was once again laid to rest not far from those of his older brother and family.

If the story is true, there's something peculiarly satisfying about the neatness of its ironies. Both Wikipedia and DNA testing are extremely recent inventions, both allegedly dedicated to the cause of truth albeit by different, perhaps even opposite, means. DNA testing is a product of modernity's narrative of science and progress, and so is the internet itself. But Wikipedia is a postmodern phenomenon, one whose essence is the idea of a challenge to authority, and in which constant change is the norm. Being brought the one by the other raises questions about both that take me a long way away from the book review I'm supposed to be writing. (Although I suppose the coronation of Nicolas II was the beginning of the end of pre-modern Russia and its ramifications for world history.)

And in the meantime, there's a curly question of grammar in that quotation. Is it 'his remains was' or 'his remains were'?