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4000-year-old hairs reveal ancient human genome
by Ishita Sood - February 11, 2010 - comments
An artist's impression shows how Inuk might have looked 4,000 years ago. Inuk was from the extinct Saqqaq culture.
Copenhagen, Denmark, February 11 -- A 4,000-year-old hairball found frozen in Greenland has been used to create the first ancient-human genome. The hairs belong to a Greenlander who lived among the Saqqaq people.
The man was from the earliest known culture in southern Greenland which had lasted from 2500 BC until 800 BC.
Morten Rasmussen and his colleagues of the University of Copenhagen say that the dead man appeared to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders.
“This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit,” said the researchers.
Inuk's details
The man is nicknamed ‘Inuk,’ whose genes disclose him to be a fairly young man, robust, with dark skin having an A-positive blood. He had brown eyes and thick hair on scalp.
“Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth,” said Eske Willerslev, who supervised the study.
“Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations. Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young,” he added.
From Inuk's hair the scientists sequenced 79 percent of his entire genome 20 times and analyzed 350,000 variations in his DNA base pairs, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPS.
By matching Inuk's genes with modern ones, it became apparent that Inuk was a Siberian.
Willerslev, whose past projects were in Alaskan permafrost, went to retrieve the human hair in 2006. However, the samples were already present in Copenhagen. The four hair samples were retrieved in 1986 and were placed in Denmark's National Museum.
“I was freezing my butt off up there. But it turned out that the ideal specimens were already sitting in a Copenhagen museum.”
Scope and usefulness of study
The current study can help answer questions about the origins of modern humans.
“Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like,” said David Lambert and Leon Huynen of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
Inuk's genetic details are being reported today in the journal ‘Nature,’ and they result from a major collaboration led by two Danish genome specialists and their associates in America, Britain, France, Australia, China, Russia and Estonia.