Scientists Find Ancient Hominin and Animal DNA in Cave Sediments archaeology science
A research team led by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Flinders University scientists has successfully extracted ancient DNA from a collection of undisturbed blocks of Pleistocene sediment recovered from 13 archaeological sites in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America and soaked in synthetic plastic-like resin as long as four decades ago.
“The preservation that comes from fixing the sediment in resin allowed our team to pinpoint at the micro-scale the origins of DNA within the chaotic mix of sediments and organic components, showing that there are ‘hot spot’ concentrations of genetic material in bone and fossil feces,” Dr. Morley said.
“In an era of restricted travel, these blocks of fixed sediments could be used to curate sediment DNA that are preserved within microscopic fragments of bone and coprolite of the animals and humans of that time.” “It clearly shows that the high success rate of ancient mammalian DNA retrieval from Denisova Cave sediments comes from the abundance of microremains in the sediment matrix rather than from free extracellular DNA from feces, bodily fluids or decomposing cellular tissue potentially adsorbed onto mineral grains,” said Dr. Vera Aldeias, a researcher at the University of Algarve.
“We could identify the sex of the individuals who left their DNA behind, and showed that they belonged to a population related to a Neanderthal whose genome was previously reconstructed from a bone fragment discovered in the cave.”
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