Written in bone
Genetic data from ancient Europeans are rewriting the prehistory of the continent
KEEPING CLEAN When studying ancient specimens, researchers work in ultraclean rooms to avoid contaminating samples with DNA from modern people or the environment.
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T. HARTMANN/PALEOGENETICS LABORATORY, MAINZ, GERMANY
Researchers are reconstructing the migrations that carried agriculture into Europe by analyzing DNA from the skeletons of early farmers and the people they displaced.
Carles Lalueza-Fox nearly missed an opportunity to paint the genetic portrait of a 7,000-year-old Spaniard.
In 2006, spelunkers stumbled across the ancient remains of two men in a cave in Spain’s Cantabrian mountain range. Lalueza-Fox, an evolutionary geneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, got a call inviting him to examine the skeletons’ DNA.
About the author：
Tina Hesman Saey
Molecular biology writer Tina Hesman Saey is a geneticist-turned-science writer who covers all things microscopic and a few too big to be viewed under a microscope. She is an honors graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she did research on tobacco plants and ethanol-producing bacteria. She spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, studying microbiology and traveling. Her work on how yeast turn on and off one gene earned her a Ph.D. in molecular genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. Tina then rounded out her degree collection with a master’s in science journalism from Boston University. She interned at the Dallas Morning News and Science News before returning to St. Louis to cover biotechnology, genetics and medical science for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After a seven year stint as a newspaper reporter, she returned to Science News. Her work has been honored by the Endocrine Society and the Genetics Society of America.
From： www.sciencenews.org/article/written-bone