2023-05-03 15:08:00
An international research team presents a new method for DNA extraction in the journal “Nature”. A researcher working in Vienna dated charcoal remains from the vicinity of the find.
A research team was able to isolate the genetic material of its former wearer from a piece of jewelery made 19,000 to 25,000 years ago. The elk deer fang pendant found in Siberia’s Denisova Cave in northwestern Altai Mountains was worn by a woman closely related to people then living further east. The new method reveals completely new insights into prehistoric life.
The Denisova Cave is an extraordinary treasure trove for researchers. In it you can find evidence of human use more or less continuously over the past 200,000 years, according to broadcasts on Wednesday in the study published in the journal “Nature”. The most spectacular discovery from the cave was the one regarding 13 years ago, when DNA analysis of a finger bone revealed that the finds also included relics of a previously unknown species of early humans. Along with the Neanderthals, the “Denisovans” are now thought to be the closest extinct relatives of modern humans.
In the years that followed, the finds from southern Siberia opened up further insights into the way of life of early human representatives and their hunting behavior. In 2021, for example, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena (Germany) and, among others, their colleague Katerina Douka, who works at the University of Vienna, analyzed around 3,800 bone fragments from animals and humans from the cave using a complex genetic procedure. New Denisovaner heritage also came to the fore here.
“Ancient Artifact Washing Machine”
An international team headed by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (MPI-EVA) is now investigating the question of what genetic information can be gleaned from artefacts of non-human origin. The focus was on developing a new method for extracting human DNA fragments from old teeth or bones that had been processed or used by humans without destroying them.
If this succeeds, the scientists might use modern analyzes to match old finds to their creators or owners. Now the team led by the main authors of the new study, Elena Essel and Matthias Meyer from the MPI-EVA, can come up with a success story. To do this, the researchers focused on bones and teeth. Their surfaces are porous, which increases the chance that skin cells or body fluids containing gene traces can penetrate the material to some extent and remain there.
To get this information, the team set up a kind of “ancient artifact washing machine”. If we wash the artifacts at temperatures of up to 90 degrees Celsius, we are able to extract DNA from the washing water while the artifacts are completely remain intact,” says Essel. However, the first experiments with finds from the 1970s to the 1990s mainly found genetic material from the archaeologists who excavated them or who researched them.
Pendant made from an elk deer tooth solves puzzles
However, the scientists were successful with a teardrop-shaped pendant made from the tooth of an elk deer from the Denisova Cave, which Russian archaeologists in protective gear excavated in the summer of 2019. The cave is known for the fact that biomolecules are particularly well preserved there. In fact, with the new method, DNA fragments were found both from the deer and from the woman who most likely made the pendant, wore it and ultimately lost it in the cave.
The analyzes show that the genetic information of humans and animals comes from the same time and is between 19,000 and 25,000 years old. This also fits with the dating of charcoal remains from the area around the find that Douka contributed to the study. The youngest coal remains date back to around 24,000 years ago.
Douka and her colleague Tim Higham, who is not involved in this work, have analyzed numerous artifacts from the cave in the past. The new findings and the method for DNA extraction by the German colleagues are “an enormous technical breakthrough” and one of the most exciting discoveries in the research field in the past ten years. You can now understand who once did something with an object, says Douka. This allows completely new insights into the organization of earlier societies. “Ultimately, we get an extraordinary insight into the everyday life of Stone Age people.”
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