Femur from Sima de los HuesosMEYER ET AL, 2013. Sima de los Huesos, a cave in northern Spain, contains one of the largest collections of hominin fossils ever discovered. Now, this so-called “pit of bones” has also yielded the oldest hominin DNA ever sequenced.
Using a thigh bone from the cave, Matthias Meyer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has sequenced the almost complete mitochondrial genome of one of Sima de los Huesos’ inhabitants, who likely lived around 400,000 years ago. That is at least four times older than the previous record-holder—a small 100,000-year-old stretch of Neanderthal DNA.
“It’s an incredible breakthrough. They managed to get DNA out of a sample that dates back to a time before either modern humans or Neanderthals existed,” said David Reich from Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study.
The team’s success greatly expands the range of places from which scientists could hope to recover ancient DNA. And Sima de los Huesos—already an important site for understanding human ...
