Oldest DNA Recovered From 7,000-Year-Old Skeletons In Spain 146
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers published a paper in the current issue of Current Biology detailing their analysis of DNA from 7,000-year old cavemen in northern Spain. From the article: 'The bones of the two young adult males were found in a cave in the Cantabarian mountain range in 2006 by a handful of explorers, 4,920 feet above sea level. The cold atmosphere is what preserved the DNA in the remains of the two bodies. The cavemen lived during the Mesolithic period and were hunter-gatherers, as determined by an ornament one of the skeletons was holding. They have named the two skeletons Braña1 and Braña2 after the Braña-Arintero site in which they were discovered. They were in near-perfect condition.'"
Oldest human dna (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the oldest dna, but the oldest human DNA that they've found. This site [creation.com] reports DNA extracted from a 20 million year magnolia leaf.
Re:This kind of surprises me (Score:5, Informative)
Re:JP (Score:5, Informative)
No time soon. Despite earlier signs, there has been no legitimate DNA recovery from the Mesozoic, the time of the dinosaurs. All the earlier discoveries from amber of that age have turned out to be bogus, as have claims of obtaining DNA from dinosaur bone (it was contamination). In fact, the story is the same for most younger examples too. The oldest legitimate DNA is no more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and very fragmentary. So, we may get information from mammoths, moas, and giant sloths of the Pleistocene, but apparently nothing from extinct dinosaurs. Check this paper [nhm.ac.uk] [PDF] and this one [www.ul.pt] [PDF] for short reviews, and this one [mcmaster.ca] for a longer review.
Re:Oldest human dna (Score:4, Informative)
A few months ago an entire high-quality 30,000-year old Denisovan genome [sciencemag.org] was published.
Re:an ornament? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah I could not find out what the ornament was.
It was a medallion that said "Member of the Hunter-Gatherer Club of Braña-Arintero". How much more proof do you need?
Re:an ornament? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Must be fake. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:JP (Score:2, Informative)
Excellent TED talk on this. Jack Horner's team is taking a novel...somewhat terrifying approach since there's no DNA available, but he spends a LOT of time talking about trying to get some viable DNA from various sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken.html