A ball of 4,000-year-old hair frozen in time tangled around a whalebone comb led to the first ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome a decade ago. The hair, which was preserved in arctic permafrost in Greenland, was collected in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 2010 that evolutionary biologists were able to use pioneering shotgun DNA sequencing to reconstruct the genetic history of the hair. It sparked a ‘decade of discovery.’

The hair, which was preserved in arctic permafrost in Greenland, was collected in the 1980s and stored at a museum in Denmark. It wasn’t until 2010 that evolutionary biologist Professor Eske Willerslev was able to use pioneering shotgun DNA sequencing to reconstruct the genetic history of the hair.

He found it came from a man from the earliest known people to settle in Greenland known as the Saqqaq culture. It was the first time scientists had recovered an entire ancient human genome.

Now a review of the first decade of ancient genomics of the Americas published in Nature today (June 16 2021) written by Professor Willerslev a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, with one of his longstanding collaborators Professor David Meltzer, an archaeologist based at Southern Methodist University, Texas, shows how the world’s first analysis of an ancient genome sparked an incredible ‘decade of discovery’.

Professor Willerslev said: «The last ten years has been full of surprises in the understanding of the peopling of the Americas — I often feel like a child at Christmas waiting to see what exciting DNA present I am about to unwrap! What has really blown my mind is how resilient and capable the early humans we have sequenced DNA from were — they occupied extremely different environments and often populated them in a short space of time.

«We were taught in school that people would stay put until the population grew to a level where the resources were exhausted. But we found people were spreading around the world just to explore, to discover, to have adventures.

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Materials provided by St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.