For the first-time researchers have extracted the DNA of the Denisovan and Neanderthals not fr om bones, but fr om sediment in caves. The work was conducted by researchers from the German Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology of the Max Planck Society in collaboration with a team of Russian archaeologists and paleontologists including Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and member of the Novosibirsk State University Scientific Council Anatoly Derevyanko and Director of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics SB RAS, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor of the NSU Department of Archeology and Ethnography Mikhail Shunkov. This new method will allow us to search for traces of ancient people's even in places wh ere there are no visible body remains.
This was described in an article published in the journal “Science”. Scientists set out to detect human DNA in clay and other deposits at the bottom of caves wh ere ancient people lived. For this, soil samples were taken in sterile conditions in the habitats of Neanderthals and Denisovan man in Belgium, Croatia, France, Russia, and Spain.
Researchers have collected samples of sediments aged 14-550 thousand years. Using a small amount of material, they restored and analyzed fragments of mitochondrial DNA and identified them as belonging to twelve different kinds of mammals, including woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear and cave hyena.
Nine samples from four caves contained human DNA in an amount sufficient for analysis. In eight soil samples, fragments of the genome belonging to one or more Neanderthals were identified, in a sample taken from the Denisova cave in the Altai, the DNA of a Denisovan man was found.
