Faced with a scarcity of fossil-derived DNA at certain archaeological sites, researchers searched the dirt — and found a genetic treasure trove.
One hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals gathered in a cave perched 3,000 feet up in present-day Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains. While cooking and watching youngsters wrestle, they littered the floor with DNA in shed skin, spit and other bodily debris.
Instead, they searched the dirt for loose DNA. In 2018, researchers dropped into pits at Estatuas and collected sediment from layers that formed between 70,000 and 113,000 years ago. They had fetched nearly 800 sediment samples in 2017 from the Chagyrskaya and Denisova caves in southern Siberia, promising locations that had already yielded DNA-bearing fossils of Neanderthals and their Denisovan relatives.
These filthy findings set an important precedent. Artifacts like stone tools are common, but fossils aren’t — particularly those with surviving DNA. Studies have recovered mitochondrial DNA from sediment, but this genome snippet only reflects one maternal branch from the evolutionary tree. “It’s [been] impossible, at sites where DNA was not found, to connect the genetics with the really detailed work that archaeologists do” analyzing artifacts, says Vernot.
In 2021, other laboratories fished through dirt from caves in the countries of Georgia and Mexico and nabbed genome-spanning DNA from Ice Age, wolf, bison and bear. Meanwhile, scientists at Harvard University and the Joslin Diabetes Center searched paleo-feces. Discovered decades ago in Utah and Mexico rock shelters, the 1,000- to 2,000-year-old turds contained digested food, including maize and grasshopper.
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