They obtain the DNA of the woman who wore it some 20,000 years ago from an earring

Stone, bone, or tooth artifacts provide important information about early humans’ subsistence strategies, behavior, and culture. However, until now it has been difficult to attribute these artifacts to specific individuals, as burials and grave goods were very rare in the Paleolithic. This has limited the possibilities of drawing conclusions about, for example, the division of labor or the social roles of individuals during this period.

In order to directly link cultural objects to specific individuals and thus deepen our understanding of Paleolithic societies, an international and interdisciplinary research team, led from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has developed a novel method non-destructive to isolate DNA from objects made of teeth or other bones.

Although artifacts made from bone matter are generally rarer than those made from stone, the researchers specifically focused on bone-type artifacts because these are more porous and therefore more likely to retain the DNA present. in the skin cells, sweat and other bodily fluids of the person who habitually used them.

By subjecting the objects to a special wash at temperatures of up to 90 degrees Celsius, Elena Essel’s team, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, was able to extract DNA from the water used in the wash, keeping the objects intact.

There were several unsuccessful attempts, the main obstacle being that the human DNA extracted was from the archaeologists who had found the objects or from other people who later examined them.

Success finally came with an earring found in Denisova Cave, located in southern Siberia, famous, among other things, for being an ancient settlement of the Denisovans, the closest extinct evolutionary relatives to anatomically modern humans other than neanderthals. They are called Denisovans because the Denisova cave was the site where their first remains were found.

In 2019, archaeologists Maxim Kozlikin and Michael Shunkov, at the time unaware of the new method being developed in Leipzig, unearthed with the utmost care (barely touching it) a deer tooth modified to serve as an earring, from Upper Paleolithic times. , in the Denisova cave.

From it, the Leipzig geneticists isolated not only the DNA of the animal itself, but also large amounts of ancient human DNA. “The amount of human DNA we recovered from the earring was extraordinary, almost as if we had taken a sample from a human tooth,” Essel said.

The pendant discovered in Denisova Cave, prior to DNA extraction using the new method. (Photo: © Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the researchers concluded that most of the DNA probably came from a single human individual. They were able to make an estimate of the age of the earring: between 19,000 and 25,000 years.

In addition to the mitochondrial DNA, the researchers also recovered a substantial fraction of its human owner’s nuclear genome. Based on the number of X chromosomes, they determined that the earring was made, worn, or otherwise worn by a woman.

The study is titled “Ancient human DNA recovered from a Palaeolithic pendant”. And it has been published in the academic journal Nature. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)