Ancient Sediments may Provide a Blueprint for Human Origin

Archaeological sediments have been recognized as a blueprint for decoding the various mysteries of life in recent years. This is greatly attributed to its preserved ancient biomolecules — DNA for thousands of years. Scientists at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology finally discover how the ancient human and animal DNA can remain stably localized in sediments, preserved in microscopic fragments of bone and feces.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The retrieval of ancient human and faunal DNA from sediments offers exciting new opportunities to investigate the geographical and temporal distribution of ancient humans and other organisms at sites where their skeletal remains are rare or absent,” says Matthias Meyer, senior author of the study and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Significance of Ancient Sediments

The team applied geological techniques to study DNA preservation in sediment and reconstruct the formation of sediment and sites.

This helped them to successfully extract the DNA from a collection of blocks of sediment (prepared as long as 40 years ago) from sites in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

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“It clearly shows that the high success rate of ancient mammalian DNA retrieval from Denisova Cave sediments comes from the abundance of micro remains in the sediment matrix rather than from free extracellular DNA from feces, bodily fluids, or decomposing cellular tissue potentially adsorbed onto mineral grains. This study is a big step closer to understand precisely where and under what conditions ancient DNA is preserved in sediments,” says Vera Aldeias, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Algarve in Portugal.

Source-Medindia