“In other words, each ancient bacterial genome is like a 60,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and each piece of tooth tartar contains millions of genomes.” A form of calcified dental plaque, tartar contains the same minerals as the human skeleton, with similar survival potential for archaeological discovery, preserving DNA over millennia. “A typical bacterial genome is 3 million base pairs long, but time fragments the ancient DNA we recover to an average length of only about 30 to 50 base pairs,” Warinner explained. Still, scraping ancient teeth - “We use the same tools as in a dentist’s office - you can call us very belated dental hygienists,” Warinner said - yields only fragments of highly degraded genetic material. “And because it’s on a person’s teeth, we can very clearly associate it with that person and their life,” Warinner said. A form of calcified dental plaque, tartar contains the same minerals as the human skeleton, with similar survival potential for archaeological discovery. The group’s findings and genome-reconstruction techniques are outlined in a paper published Thursday in Science.Īn expert in biomolecular archaeology, Warinner has pioneered the study of ancient tooth tartar, the only part of the human body that fossilizes during life.
Warinner, who is also a group leader with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to achieve this feat. “That’s 90,000 years older than the next nearest reconstructed genome.” This breakthrough was made possible only after scientists achieved another first - they successfully reconstructed the genomes of ancient microorganisms up to 100,000 years old, said Christina Warinner, associate professor of anthropology at Harvard and a senior author on the new study. For the first time, molecules dating to the Stone Age have been revived in the lab.
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