Scientists have used a new method for extracting ancient DNA to identify the owner of a 20,000-year-old pendant fashioned from an elk’s canine tooth.
The method can isolate DNA that was present in skin cells, sweat or other body fluids and was absorbed by certain types of porous material including bones, teeth and tusks when 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 behaviour and culture, though our understanding has been limited by an inability to tie a particular object to a particular person.
“I find these objects made in the deep past extremely fascinating since they allow us to open a small window to travel back and have a glance into these people’s lives,” said the molecular biologist Elena Essel of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The researchers who found the pendant, which was determined to be 19,000-25,000 years old, used gloves and face masks when excavating and handling it, avoiding contamination with modern DNA.
It became the first prehistoric artefact linked by genetic sleuthing to a specific person: a stone age woman closely related to a population of hunter-gatherers known to have lived in a part of Siberia east of the cave site in the foothills of the Altai mountains in Russia.
It is unknown whether the woman made or merely wore the pendant.
Essel said in holding such an artefact in her own gloved hands, she felt “transported back in time, imagining the human hands that had created and used it thousands of years ago”.
She added: “As I looked at the object, a flood of questions came to mind. Who was the person who made it? Was this tool passed down from one generation to the next, from a mother to a daughter or from a father to a son? That we can start addressing these questions using genetic tools is still absolutely incredible to me.”
The pendant’s maker drilled a hole in the tooth to allow for some sort of now-lost cordage. The tooth alternatively could have been part of a head band or bracelet.
Our species Homo sapiens first arose more than 300,000 years ago in Africa. The oldest-known objects used as personal adornments date to about 100,000 years ago from the continent, according to the University of Leiden’s Marie Soressi, the study’s senior archeologist.
Denisova Cave was long ago inhabited at different times by the extinct human species called Denisovans, Neanderthals and our species. The cave over the years has yielded remarkable finds, including the first-known remains of Denisovans and various tools and other artefacts.
The nondestructive research technique, used at a “clean room” laboratory in Leipzig, works much like a washing machine. In this case, an artefact is immersed in a liquid that works to release DNA from it much as a washing machine lifts dirt from a blouse.
By linking objects with particular people, the technique could shed light on prehistoric social roles and division of labour between the sexes, or clarify whether or not an object was even made by our species. Some artefacts have been found in places known to have been inhabited, for instance, by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals simultaneously.
Soressi said: “This study opens huge opportunities to better reconstruct the role of individuals in the past according to their sex and ancestry.”
