DNA reveals possible owner of 20,000-year-old pendant – 5/3/2023 – Science

Inside a Siberian cave that has been an archaeological treasure chest, an elk canine tooth drilled to become a pendant was unearthed by scientists carefully to avoid contamination of this intriguing artifact made some 20,000 years ago.

Collecting the pendant preserved in Denisova Cave paid dividends. Scientists said on Wednesday that a new method for extracting ancient DNA had identified the object’s possible owner – a Stone Age woman closely related to a hunter-gatherer population known to have lived in a part of Siberia east of the Cave site at the foot of the Altai mountains, Russia.

The method can isolate DNA that was present in skin cells, sweat or other bodily fluids and was absorbed into certain types of porous material, including bones, teeth and fangs, when it was handled by someone thousands of years ago.

Objects used as tools or for personal adornment—pendants, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and the like—can offer insight into past behavior and culture, although our understanding has been limited by the inability to link an object to a particular person.

“I find these objects made in the remote past extremely fascinating, as they allow us to open a small window to travel backwards and get a glimpse of these people’s lives,” said molecular biologist Elena Essel of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, principal author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The researchers who found the pendant, estimated to be between 19,000 and 25,000 years old, wore gloves and masks when excavating and handling it, avoiding contamination with modern DNA. It became the first prehistoric artifact linked by genetic research to a specific person. It is not known whether the woman made it or just used it.

Essel said that as she held the artifact in her gloved hands, she felt “transported back in time, imagining the human hands that created and used it thousands of years ago.”

“As I looked at the object, a flood of questions came to mind. Who was the person who made it? Has this utensil been passed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, or from father to son? The fact that we can begin to tackling these questions using genetic tools is still absolutely amazing to me,” added Essel.

The pendant’s maker drilled a hole in the tooth to pass some kind of string, now lost. The tooth could also form part of a headband or bracelet.

Our species, the homo sapiens, first appeared more than 300 thousand years ago in Africa, then spread throughout the world. The oldest objects used as personal adornments date back to around 100,000 years ago in Africa, according to Marie Soressi, from the University of Leiden (Netherlands), the main archaeologist of the study.

Denisova Cave was inhabited at different times by Denisovans and Neanderthals, extinct human species, and by our species. The cave has produced notable finds over the years, including the earliest known Denisovan remains and various tools and artifacts.

The new non-destructive research technique, used in a laboratory in Leipzig (Germany), works a bit like a washing machine. In this case, an artifact is immersed in a liquid that works to release its DNA, in the same way that a washing machine removes dirt from a garment.

By linking objects to specific people, the technique could shed light on prehistoric social roles and the division of labor between the sexes, or even whether or not an object was made by our species. Some artifacts have been found in places known to have been inhabited, for example by homo sapiens and Neanderthals at the same time.

“This study opens up great opportunities to better reconstruct the role of individuals in the past according to their sex and ancestry,” said Soressi.