The first ancient person to have his genome fully sequenced looks from the illustration like a close relative of Genghis Khan. He is in fact a 4000 year old Eskimo:
HE HAD brown eyes, dark skin, thick blackish hair and type A blood. This Eskimo, who lived about 4000 years ago in Greenland, also had dry earwax, an increased risk of going bald and the metabolism of a person who could survive in a cold climate.
And his ancestors were, to the surprise of scientists, ancient people in east Siberia rather than neighbouring Native Americans or Inuit.
All this detailed information about the long-dead man comes from a study of a clump of his hair, which was preserved for thousands of years in the Arctic permafrost. Given the name Inuk, he will go down in history as the first ancient person to have had his full DNA code, or genome, sequenced.
Inuk, who was also inbred, is thought to have belonged to the extinct Saqqaq culture, the first group of people known to have settled in Greenland.
February 11, 2010 at 12:48 pm |
Doesn’t surprise me that he’s inbred – what kind of options would you have in a wild place like that? Amazing that they can now extract DNA from hair – not just the follicle but the hair itself. Perhaps they could even do that with mammoths?
February 22, 2010 at 10:45 pm |
of course they Khan do it
February 22, 2010 at 11:15 pm |
He must have been a monogloid