Really old human DNA (we’re talking thousands of years) holds amazing secrets about our distant past. What did we look like? Where did our ancestors come from? What diseases may we have had? Unfortunately, it’s much more difficult than it seems to unlock these mysteries.
Now researchers have hit upon a way to enrich, or increase the proportion of ancient human DNA in an environmental sample from about 1.2 percent to nearly 60 percent–rendering it vastly easier to sequence and analyze.
Read the full, original story here: On the hunt for ancient DNA, Stanford researchers improve the odds
