Woman’s DNA discovered in 20,000 year old deer-tooth pendant | 24CA News

Scientists have found a girl’s DNA preserved in a 20,000 yr outdated deer-tooth pendant. 

The artifact, which was found in 2019 within the Altai Mountains of Siberia, was analyzed by a German analysis workforce that developed superior strategies for extracting and learning historical DNA.

“This was exactly what we were hoping for,”  mentioned geneticist Elena Essel, a member of the workforce on the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. 

“It was clear that a human handled it and also potentially was wearing it, so we actually were hoping that … the maker or user or wearer of this artifact left some of his or her DNA on this pendant.”

The group’s work was printed this week within the journal Nature.

The pendant was found in Denisova cave, which has been a wealthy supply of archeological finds about early people in Eurasia for many years. 

The cool and dry situations within the cave have made it potential for scientists to get well preserved DNA left behind by historical Denisovans, Neanderthals and people, all of whom occupied the cave at totally different instances over 40,000 years.

Unusual discovery

What makes the research of this pendant uncommon is that Essel and her colleagues had been capable of extract human DNA from animal stays.

The pendant was produced from a canine tooth of a species of deer often called wapiti. There is a gap drilled within the tooth, suggesting it was threaded with a wire and will’ve be worn.

But Essel says they don’t seem to be positive how the pendant was worn. 

“It’s possible that it was worn like a necklace. Maybe it was part of a bigger necklace that contained more of those pendants,” mentioned Essel. 

“Or maybe it was also worn close to the belt, as an adornment of the clothes.”

Essel mentioned that bones and enamel are excellent candidates for extracting DNA as a result of they’re porous and the minerals in them binds to and protects the DNA. 

In this case, Essel says it appears that evidently contact with pores and skin, sweat, saliva or blood allowed the wearer’s DNA take in into the tooth.

DNA extraction

Essel says the group modified a DNA extraction approach to make it work for artifacts.

“I really like to compare it to a washing machine,” mentioned Essel.

“We put the whole artifact into a sodium phosphate buffer and then we heat it sequentially up to 90 degrees. This allows us to release the DNA that is trapped in the bone matrix of the pendant.”

Essel says it is revolutionary as a result of it is non-destructive and preserves the unique artifact. In this case, it additionally extracted a remarkably full set of DNA sequences. 

“There’s the mitochondrial DNA that is only inherited from mother to child and that we were able to reconstruct almost completely at a very high accuracy,” Essel mentioned.

“Then one has the nuclear DNA, which is 3 billion bases long. So it’s a lot of DNA. And for that we didn’t try to recover the full genome. For that we were able to recover roughly 70 per cent.”

‘Like a gender reveal’

They had been capable of genetically date the pendant to an estimated age vary of 19,000 to 25,000 years outdated. 

And the exceptional preservation of the DNA allowed Essel and her workforce to find out loads of details about the wearer, and place her on the human household tree. 

“The DNA that we recovered is closest to a population that was also present during that time in the Northern Eurasian area,” mentioned Essel. 

But Essel says probably the most thrilling discovery was the gender. 

“It was a colleague of mine who did the analysis for determining the sex of the individual and he was doing the analysis late in the evening,” she mentioned.

 “He texted me, ‘It’s a girl, it’s a girl,’ like a gender reveal. It was mind blowing.”

Essel mentioned this research is an thrilling proof-of-concept for future work, and that she and her colleagues will likely be making an attempt to extract DNA from different kinds of archeological artifacts, as something manufactured from enamel, ivory, bone, or antler may have the identical potential to protect the person’s DNA.