A deer-tooth pendant from a Siberian cave yielded DNA left by a woman who lived some 20,000 years ago.
Twenty thousand years ago, someone dropped a deer-tooth pendant in a cave in southwestern Siberia, where it lay until archaeologists excavated it in 2019. Now, researchers have caught a glimpse of its last wearer. After years of effort, Elena Essel, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , developed a way to extract DNA embedded in an artifact’s porous surface by sweat and skin cells.
After 5 years of trial and error with different chemicals and methods, the EVA team found that submerging an entire artifact in a mild sodium phosphate buffer bath while slowly heating it from room temperature to more than 90°C worked best. This released the ancient DNA trapped in the bone gradually, starting with DNA on the surface and ending with DNA from deeper within the bone matrix, while leaving the artifact’s surface texture unharmed.
where ancient DNA from modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans has been found in fossils and sediments,When Essel opened the bag in a clean room, she could see the tip of a deer tooth pendant encased in sediment. It turned out to be her lucky piece, yielding a “surprisingly high” amount of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, she says.
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