A new way to remove ancient DNA from artifacts could help to probe how Stone Age people lived.
In the new study, Essel, Pääbo and colleagues describe their method for ancient DNA extraction, which involves submerging bone and tooth artifacts in a sodium phosphate solution for three 30-minute periods at each of four temperatures. Objects are first placed in a room temperature solution, followed by three increasingly hotter solutions, ending at 90° Celsius.
Treatment at the highest temperature released human DNA that had penetrated deeply into the tooth artifact via extensive contact when it was made or used, the researchers say. Milder solution temperatures yielded ancient DNA closer to the pendant’s surface that originated from surrounding sediment, including that of an elk species.
Analyses of recovered human and elk mitochondrial DNA, usually inherited from mothers, generated an age estimate for the pendant of roughly 18,500 to 24,700 years old. That’s consistent with radiocarbon dates for burned wood that the researchers unearthed near the pendant. Radiocarbon dates are more precise than those generated from ancient DNA but cannot always be obtained from fragile or small artifacts, Essel says.
Two coauthors of the new study — archaeologists Maxim Kozlikin and Michael Shunkov of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk — directed a 2019 excavation that produced the newly analyzed pierced tooth at Siberia’s
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