Who wore this pendant

20,000 years ago? DNA

can now tell us
A breakthrough technique extracts human DNA from
bone artifacts, offering scientists an unrivaled look at
the individual owners or creators of objects from the
deep past.
BYTOM METCALFE
PUBLISHED MAY 3, 2023
• 6 MIN READ

Ancient DNA has transformed archaeology: It’s

now possible to determine the sex and ancestry of
ancient humans by amplifying the coded genetic
material that survives in their remains. Ancient
DNA studies now span hundreds of thousands of
years, and offer new understanding on events in
the deep past, like the migrations of the first
Americans and where the Neanderthals went .

Now a new study published in the

journal Nature reports that scientists have
extracted human DNA from a deer-tooth pendant
likely worn by a woman about 20,000 years ago.
This is the first time ancient human DNA has been
recovered from an artifact made from another
animal, and researchers hope the breakthrough
method will also be used in the future to reveal
critical information such as which hominin species
made a particular bone tool, for example, or how
ancient humans divided tasks between sexes, such
as sewing hides or making bone spear points. This
new DNA extraction technique can also date bone
artifacts without damaging them—an advantage
over radiocarbon dating, which destroys a small
sample of the material.

“This is a proof of principle study,” says a study

senior author, geneticist Matthias Meyer at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It will take
some time until this translates into new insights…
but it will be huge.”

A top view of the deer-tooth pendant discovered in Denisova Cave in

southern Siberia. It was likely worn by a woman there some 20,000
years ago.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR
EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Paleolithic pendant
Meyer and his colleagues studied a pendant made
from a deer tooth found in Siberia’s Denisova cave
in 2021. The cave was occupied by different
hominin groups for about 50,000 years and
became famous in 2010 with the discovery there of
a previously unknown human species
called Denisovans. The pendant, however, comes
from a sediment layer about 20,000 years old,
when the cave was inhabited by Homo sapiens. It’s
not been possible before now to extract ancient
human DNA from such an artifact; usually a
sample would be drilled from the tooth and ground
up, hopefully revealing the DNA of the deer it came
from. But the new technique, which involves
washing the artifact in a sodium phosphate
solution, has recovered both sets of ancient DNA—
from the deer as well as the human who made or
wore it—and without damaging the pendant.

Molecular biologist Elena Essel, the study’s lead

author and a doctoral student at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, says the
researchers tried different chemicals until they hit
on using sodium phosphate, which is also used in
washing powders for clothes.
The method of extracting DNA is also similar to
doing laundry: the pendant was bathed in a fresh
batch of the solution several times, at increasing
temperatures up to almost 200 degrees
Fahrenheit.

The researchers used their knowledge of human

and deer genetics to distinguish one (Homo
sapiens) from the other (wapiti, a type of elk), and
to determine both the sex and ancestry of the
human, showing she descended from ancient
North Eurasians, an ancient population that until
now has only been recorded further east.

The researchers also dated the pendant by

calculating the number of mutations in the ancient
DNA and comparing them to modern genomes.
Both the deer and the human DNA yielded a date
of between 19,000 and 25,000 years ago, which is
a larger time range than that provided by
radiocarbon dating (which can provide dates to
within a few decades in some cases) but was done
without damaging the pendant—while the
radiocarbon method would, Essel says.

Archaeological advance
Archaeologist Marie Soressi of Leiden University
in the Netherlands, a senior author of the paper,
says bone artifacts are not as common to find as
stone artifacts in prehistoric archaeological sites,
perhaps because they often decay over time. But
there are still many, including bone figurines,
sewing needles, tools for knapping flints, and bone
spear points and arrowheads. “For the first time
we can make a correlation between a specific
[bone] object and a specific individual, according
to the biological sex of the individual or ancestry,”
she says.

As well as revealing if sewing or making art was

done mainly by one sex or the other, the technique
might also determine whether Neanderthals
or Homo sapiens made bone artifacts found at
locations where both species lived, she says.

The researchers are still studying how long a bone

artifact needs to be handled for it to absorb human
DNA. Soressi says the pendant was probably worn
next to the skin for months or years. But the
human DNA might also come from the person who
made the pendant and handled it for a relatively
short time.
Geneticist Kendra Sirak at Harvard University’s
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, who
wasn’t involved in the study, notes the new non-
destructive method of extracting ancient DNA will
preserve delicate bone artifacts for archaeologists
who may have different analytical techniques. “The
great thing about this technique is that it keeps the
integrity of an artifact, which means that other
people can perform different types of studies on
it,” she says.

Soressi says archaeologists who hope to use the

new technique will need to take special measures
when first excavating the artifact to avoid
contaminating any ancient DNA with modern
genetic material, such as wearing gloves and masks
while digging and quickly enclosing artifacts in
plastic bags: “It will require a change in routine.”

The technique will also require even more

cooperation between the archaeologists who
excavate suitable artifacts and the geneticists who
will test them. But archaeologists and geneticists
already discuss how to maximize the chances of
recovering ancient DNA before a shovel or trowel
is put in the ground, Sirak says: “We’re now not
thinking about DNA as something that’s done only
after the fact.”