Nuka Godfredsen
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| An artist’s impression shows how Inuk might have looked in life 4,000 years ago.
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For the first time, scientists have deciphered the genetic code of an ancient human from a long-gone culture, using the DNA from just a few tufts of 4,000-year-old hair preserved in Greenland’s permafrost.
Thanks to the rapid advance of gene-sequencing technology, researchers could tell the hair belonged to a brown-skinned man whose ancestors came to the New World from Siberia around 5,500 years ago, during a previously unknown migration. And that’s not all.
The genetic evidence suggests that the man, nicknamed “Inuk,” had the kind of eyes, teeth and even earwax associated with modern-day Asians and Native Americans … and that he might have been going bald.
One of the research team’s leaders said the technique used on Inuk’s hair could be used on other ancient samples as well, almost literally fleshing out humanity’s saga through the millennia. “I think it will be something we will see much more of in the coming five years,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen.
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