GENETICS

The Dead Begin to Speak

1997 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 1997, DNA recovered from the arm bone of the 1856 fossil that gave Neanderthals their name yielded a mitochondrial sequence unlike any living person's: the first genetic message from an extinct human. The reading, assembled from short overlapping amplifications under obsessive controls, placed Neanderthals outside modern variation and, on mitochondrial evidence alone, outside our ancestry, a conclusion the nuclear genome would later overturn. The discovery founded a discipline: molecular time travel, and the art of not fooling oneself.

Why it matters

Before this, the deep past spoke only through stones and bones; afterwards it had genetics, and questions of ancestry, migration and admixture became answerable rather than arguable. The 1997 result also taught the field its enduring lesson in humility: its own headline conclusion was overturned by better data thirteen years later. Every ancient genome on this timeline, Denisovan, Tianyuan, plague, descends from the methods first proved on this bone.

Dating & uncertainty

The 1997 sequence came from the original Neandertal specimen of 1856, and its authors concluded, from mitochondrial DNA alone, that Neanderthals had gone extinct without contributing to our mitochondrial ancestry; taken more broadly than the evidence allowed, that verdict fell when the nuclear genome arrived in 2010. The early years of ancient DNA were a school of rigour: contamination by modern DNA mimics a real result so well that clean rooms, independent replication and damage signatures became the price of belief.

Sources

1. Krings et al. (1997), Cell · Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humansdoi:10.1016/s0092-8674(00)80310-4
2. Krings et al. (1999), PNAS · DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neandertal type specimendoi:10.1073/pnas.96.10.5581
3. Gilbert et al. (2005), Trends in Ecology & Evolution · Assessing ancient DNA studiesdoi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.07.005

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:528.0 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day