A Decade of Ancient DNA Analysis (VIDEO)
Caption
A ball of 4,000-year-old hair frozen in time tangled around a whalebone comb led to the first ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome just over a decade ago.
The hair, which was preserved in arctic permafrost in Greenland, was collected in the 1980s and stored at a museum in Denmark. It wasn't until 2010 that evolutionary biologist Professor Eske Willerslev was able to use pioneering shotgun DNA sequencing to reconstruct the genetic history of the hair. He found it came from a man from the earliest known people to settle in Greenland known as the Saqqaq culture. It was the first time scientists had recovered an entire ancient human genome.
Now a review of the first decade of ancient genomics of the Americas published in Nature today (June 16, 2021) written by Professor Willerslev a Fellow of St John's College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, with one of his longstanding collaborators Professor David Meltzer, an archaeologist based at Southern Methodist University, Texas, shows how the world's first analysis of an ancient genome sparked an incredible 'decade of discovery.'
Credit
St John's College, University of Cambridge
Usage Restrictions
Not for commercial use
License
Licensed content