Using new techniques scientists reveal a detailed picture of an ancient human from a hair sample found in Greenland
A group of scientists from the University of Copenhagen have reconstructed the first detailed genome of an ancient human. The man has been dubbed ‘Inuk’ meaning ‘man’ in Greenlandic.
The discovery was made after analysing a sample taken from a tuft of hair discovered in Greenland in the 1980s.
The DNA reconstruction serves as a blueprint which allows the team to infer how the original owner of the hair might have looked. It also informed illustrator Nuka Godfredtsen’s reconstructed image, as he says:
‘Inuk’s receding hairline, brown eyes, dark skin and shovel-shaped front teeth are all dictated by his 4000 year-old genetic coding.’
Besides a few bones and hair, there is precious little evidence of the early inhabitants of the region, who are most closely related to people living in present day north-east Siberia. The findings indicate that Inuk’s ancestors crossed into the New World from north-eastern Siberia between 4,400 and 6,400 years ago in a migration wave.
Until now similar efforts to map the genome of a woolly mammoth have proved unsuccessful due to the relative infancy of the technology at the scientists’ disposal.
Professor Eske Willerslev, who led the large international team behind the breakthrough, said:
‘Previously, the DNA needed to have been frozen or buried in a layer of permafrost. But with the new methods developed here at the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, that is not a premise anymore.’
Morten Rasmussen is Willerslev’s PhD student, and was responsible for much of the hands-on work during the analysis. He cited the Chinese contribution of DNA sequencing machines as a major component of the success.
‘Not so long ago, reconstructing an entire modern human genome took years, but the new methods and the abundance of sequencing machines allow us to do it in just a few months,’ Rasmussen said.
The discovery is a valuable addition to the knowledge surrounding the human genome, but science still has some way to go before the possibility of cloning ancient animals is realised. As Rasmussen says:
‘It’s like we’ve got the blueprints for a house, but we don’t know how to build it.’