Interesting article in the New York Times about a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient people. His findings trace the prehistoric migrations of our species.
From the article:
Dr. Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, pointed out a strawberry-sized chunk: “[These bone fragments are] from a 4,000-year-old site in Central Asia — from Uzbekistan, I think.”
He moved down the row. “This is a 2,500-year-old sample from a site in Britain. This is Bronze Age Russian, and these are Arabian samples. These people would have never met each other in time or space.”
Dr. Reich hopes that his team of scientists and technicians can find DNA in these bones. Odds are good that they will.
In less than three years, Dr. Reich’s laboratory has published DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in this field combined. ...
“They often answer age-old questions and sometimes provide astonishing unanticipated insights,” said Svante Paabo, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Paleoanthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
In a book to be published next week, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” Dr. Reich, 43, explains how advances in DNA sequencing and analysis have helped this new field take off.
“It’s really like the invention of a new scientific instrument, like a microscope or a telescope,” he said. “When an instrument that powerful is invented, it opens up all these horizons, and everything is new and surprising.”
Read the piece for an appreciation of how scientists are mapping the prehistoric migrations of humans through the DNA of ancient bones.
At top: A scientist at work in the Harvard lab. (© New York Times)