Oldest DNA Recovered From 7,000-Year-Old Skeletons In Spain

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Oldest DNA Recovered From 7,000-Year-Old Skeletons In Spain

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday July 1, 2012 @08:52PM from the original-markers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers published a paper in the current issue of Current Biology detailing their analysis of DNA from 7,000-year old cavemen in northern Spain. From the article: 'The bones of the two young adult males were found in a cave in the Cantabarian mountain range in 2006 by a handful of explorers, 4,920 feet above sea level. The cold atmosphere is what preserved the DNA in the remains of the two bodies. The cavemen lived during the Mesolithic period and were hunter-gatherers, as determined by an ornament one of the skeletons was holding. They have named the two skeletons Braña1 and Braña2 after the Braña-Arintero site in which they were discovered. They were in near-perfect condition.'"

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JP by kh31d4r · 2012-07-01 20:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

When are we cloning dinosaurs?
1. Re:JP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-01 23:56 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  No time soon. Despite earlier signs, there has been no legitimate DNA recovery from the Mesozoic, the time of the dinosaurs. All the earlier discoveries from amber of that age have turned out to be bogus, as have claims of obtaining DNA from dinosaur bone (it was contamination). In fact, the story is the same for most younger examples too. The oldest legitimate DNA is no more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and very fragmentary. So, we may get information from mammoths, moas, and giant sloths of the Pleistocene, but apparently nothing from extinct dinosaurs. Check this paper [PDF] and this one [PDF] for short reviews, and this one for a longer review.
Santa is just an anagram by bmo · 2012-07-01 20:55 · Score: 4, Funny

They were planted there by Satan to test your faith in the Earth being 6000 years old.
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BMO
Re:Why ? by lazarith · 2012-07-01 21:07 · Score: 5, Funny

So that we can create an amusement park and sell tickets? Duh.... It's not as if it could end badly or anything.
Re:Why ? by zero.kalvin · 2012-07-01 21:08 · Score: 5, Funny

Science doesn't ask why should we! Science asks why the heck not put chainsaws on bears and fit them with jetpacks you insensitive clod!
Re:Why ? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-01 21:09 · Score: 4, Funny

food of course, they are basically just giant chickens
Re:Why ? by tsa · 2012-07-01 21:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

Of course we should, just to show we can. We'll worry about other things later.

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-- Cheers!
Oldest human dna by tinkerton · 2012-07-01 21:41 · Score: 4, Informative

It's not the oldest dna, but the oldest human DNA that they've found. This site reports DNA extracted from a 20 million year magnolia leaf.
1. Re:Oldest human dna by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-02 00:03 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Yes, it's not the oldest DNA, but on further study, that plant example is thought to be bacterial contamination [PDF]. The oldest-known current examples are things like extinct mammoths and mastodons that are much younger than 20 million years.
2. Re:Oldest human dna by arobatino · 2012-07-02 00:37 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  A few months ago an entire high-quality 30,000-year old Denisovan genome was published.
Re:But where are they? by bmo · 2012-07-01 21:49 · Score: 4, Funny

You know when you tell a joke at a party and the entire room goes silent at the punch line?
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BMO
Re:This kind of surprises me by lbbros · 2012-07-01 21:49 · Score: 5, Informative

As far as I can remember, these studies on Neanderthal used mitochondrial DNA (i.e., the DNA stored in the mitochondria, which is separate from the one in the nucleus) rather than genomic (i.e. the DNA in the nucleus of the cell).

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Oh how I wish Slashdot would consider... by outsider007 · 2012-07-01 22:06 · Score: 3, Funny

Not perpetuating the stereotype of spaniards as gay cavemen.

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an ornament? by C0R1D4N · 2012-07-01 22:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

Seems to be jumping to a conclusion saying they were hunter gatherers by an ornament one was holding. I mean, they probably were just by the lack of agricultural evidence from that era, but what you are holding when you die hardly indicates the nature of your entire culture.
1. Re:an ornament? by turkeyfeathers · 2012-07-02 00:50 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Yeah I could not find out what the ornament was.
  It was a medallion that said "Member of the Hunter-Gatherer Club of Braña-Arintero". How much more proof do you need?
2. Re:an ornament? by tomhath · 2012-07-02 01:08 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's hard to tell from the article, but I got the impression these two were carefully buried in the cave by other humans. Articles that are buried along with a body tell a lot about the culture. These ornaments depict red deer, which they very likely hunted.
3. Re:an ornament? by ElectricTurtle · 2012-07-02 01:23 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  In the first place, you're talking about anthropology, not archaeology. In the second place, that's how science works. If you have a hundred artifacts, you try to find a pattern from them, and then if somebody finds a hundred more that invalidate all or part of the previous hypothesized pattern, so be it. You come up with a new one that fits the available data.
  
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Re:Blue eyes by azalin · 2012-07-01 22:16 · Score: 4, Funny

Did you know that all blue man are descended from a single individual who lived only 10,000 years ago ?
That's why we call them the blue man group.
This is bad by Errol+backfiring · 2012-07-02 00:26 · Score: 4, Funny

Can't you even have privacy if you are dead for 7000 years?

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Misquote in article by tomhath · 2012-07-02 01:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

What the scientist actually said:

“These are the oldest partial genomes from modern human prehistory,” said researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist at the Spanish National Research Council.
He qualifies it with "modern human", which makes sense for a 7000 year old skeleton.
You are citing from them ? by aepervius · 2012-07-02 01:58 · Score: 4, Funny

http://creation.com/about-us#what_we_believe

You gotta kidding me , right ? You are DAMN fucking me ? "Creation magazine" ? Pleeease.

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Re:CREMATE ME PLEASE by Sentrion · 2012-07-02 03:01 · Score: 3

I'll be damned if one day I wake up inside the fortress of DOOM
Sounds like a reasonable definition of damnation to me.