It’s not easy to recover genetic material from 20,000 years ago, and it’s an even taller order finding it in anything that someone wore on their body. Firstly, because most human creations such as clothes get lost over time. Secondly, because the artifacts that have been preserved are so valuable that traditional DNA extraction techniques cannot be used on them; as they are so aggressive in nature, they would endanger the objects. Now, however, German scientists have discovered that a person’s genetic information can be recovered from a pendant they wore, just by washing the item.
The pendant in question was discovered by Russian archaeologists in one of the Denisova Caves, in Siberia. This is the region that was inhabited by the Denisovans, a species of hominid that is thought to have lived alongside the Neanderthals and the ancestors of current humans.
From the genetic analysis that they’ve carried out, the scientists have learned that the pendant’s owner was a female Homo sapiens, like modern humans, and was not a Denisovan. She is believed to have lived in the cave somewhere between 18,500 and 25,000 years ago.
