
45,000-year-old modern human bone yields a genome - tambourine_man
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/45000-year-old-modern-human-bone-yields-a-genome/
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Taek
"Overall, the Ust’-Ishim genome doesn't revolutionize our understanding of
humanity's past. But it does provide some support for ideas that have been
previously suggested. And it helps narrow the range of possibilities for a
series of other hypotheses. So it's really a great example of the incremental
progress that's typical of science."

I liked this as the closing paragraph.

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tokenadult
Here's a link to the "article preview" in _Nature_ :

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7523/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7523/full/nature13810.html)

I see the article includes an all-star cast of co-authors who have done much
of the most important research on ancient human DNA. A review article on
ancient human DNA from just a few weeks ago, "Towards a new history and
geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA," provides a lot of good
background on this topic.

[http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/03/21/003517.f...](http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/03/21/003517.full.pdf)

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lettergram
Here comes the mammoths as well!

Strangely... I am much more excited about that.

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sjf
Not really, human genome is a bit of an exaggeration "The short DNA fragments
that persist in these ancient samples limit the areas of the human genome that
you can match the fragments to".

And even if you could recover a genetically perfect sample, a resurrected
mammoth wouldn't be raised in the same environment as an animal from the time,
so all kinds of things like socialization, migration patterns, bacteria, food
sources etc. won't match the era.

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serf
would be interesting if an absent bacteria radically changed the resulting
hypothetical mammoth fetus.

