DNA Offers Sharp Image of Prehistoric Humans

Scientists have produced a digital image of a genome tens of thousands of years old with the resolution of a typical living person's, enabling them to describe the life of prehistoric humans in great detail, they reported in Thursday's issue of Science magazine.

Led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the scientists have created the highest-quality genome sequence of prehistoric humans yet.

Therefore, the Denisovans as the group has been called after the Siberian cave harboring its fossils: a finger bone and two teeth are much better known genetically than Neanderthals, although there are hundreds of specimens from them.

There is no difference in what we can learn genetically about a person that lived 50,000 years ago and from a person today, Paabo said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

The international team of researchers used only genetic material from a tiny finger bone from a girl that lived in Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. The specimen was found in a cave in 2008 and, based on preliminary genetical analyses by the team in 2010, was attributed to a novel group of humans closely related to Neanderthals.

The scientists owe their insights mainly to new technological advances in sequencing of prehistoric DNA.

All forensics on ancient DNA were originally developed for modern DNA, said Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute, lead author of the article.

He was responsible for developing approaches that take into account challenges typical for prehistoric genetic material, such as its scarcity and degraded state.

Using the DNA, the scientists reconstructed the appearance of the Siberian girl: She had brown eyes and dark hair and skin.

Also from genetic information, the scientists pieced together the girl's pedigree and compared it with that of modern humans and Neanderthals.

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DNA Offers Sharp Image of Prehistoric Humans