Nature
By Elissa Welle
May 3, 2023
Even Stone Age humans enjoyed the finer things in life, such as animal-tooth jewellery. Capitalizing on ancient fashions, scientists have extracted DNA from a 20,000-year-old deer-tooth pendant to identify the person who presumably either made or wore the ornament — a woman of north Eurasian ancestry1.
To do so, the team developed an elaborate process to extract DNA from the tooth without damaging the priceless specimen. The pendant was unearthed in Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia, which was occupied by various species of hominin over 300,000 years. The study was published in Nature today.