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Move over, DNA: ancient proteins are starting to reveal humanity’s history

Proteins dating back more than one million years have been extracted from some fossils, and could help to answer some difficult questions about archaic humans.
  1. Matthew Warren
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Homo floresiensis skull

Homo floresiensis is one of the species researchers hope to study by sequencing ancient proteins. Credit: Adapted from World History Archive/Alamy

Some time in the past 160,000 years or so, the remains of an ancient human ended up in a cave high on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Perhaps the individual died there, or parts were taken there by its kin or an animal scavenger. In just a few years, the flesh disappeared and the bones started to deteriorate. Then millennia dripped by. Glaciers retreated and then returned and retreated again, and all that was left behind was a bit of jawbone with some teeth. The bone gradually became coated in a mineral crust, and the DNA from this ancient ancestor was lost to time and weather. But some signal from the past persisted.

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Nature 570, 433-436 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01986-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 11 July 2019: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that the Stephanorhinus work cited in reference 6 was led by Enrico Cappellini.

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