Scraps of ancient DNA coaxed out of a deer tooth pendant show it likely hung around the neck of a woman or girl around 20,000 years ago.
We don’t know what she looked like, but she was related to a population of humans further east of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, in which the pendant was unearthed.
These insights into the pendant-wearer were made possible by a new technique — reported today in Nature — that can non-destructively extract ancient human DNA from objects made from porous materials like bone or teeth.
Denisova Cave has housed humans for nearly 300,000 years, by some estimates.
And it’s a “treasure box” for ancient human DNA, according to study lead researcher Elena Essel, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.