If anthropology and genetics seem distant from each other on the scientific spectrum, Connie Mulligan—a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida as well as associate director of the university’s Genetics Institute— enthusiastically makes a case for bridging the gap. “It’s easier not to have to engage with another field’s terminology and culture of collection, but I think the coolest answers come from this type of approach,” she says.
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The efforts of archaeologists as well as anthropologists and geneticists have yielded new insights on the prehistory of a dreaded disease. Tuberculosis is commonly thought to have come to the Americas with colonial expeditions from Europe, and the similarity of the Mycobacterium tuberculosisgenome on the two continents today seems to confirm this idea. Thus, anthropologist Anne Stone of Arizona State University was curious to study the genome of tuberculosis lesions that had been found on skeletons at a Peruvian site dating back several centuries before European contact. It was only by sequencing DNA from these lesions that she could identify the source of this ancient American tuberculosis, which turned out to be marine mammals—seals, in fact.
This discovery holds intriguing implications for several fields.
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