The DNA Trapped In This Stone-Age Bling Will Change History
Here’s to scientific progress, especially in genetics, and how it’ll help us be less wrong about our past.
Family photo.
Photographer: Sebastian Willnow/DDP/AFP via Getty Images
In this time of trouble and anxiety, I try to remind myself to also be amazed and inspired by our progress. From the promise of mRNA technology to heal cancer one day to experiments that could — literally — raise human consciousness, we as a species are leaping ahead. But you have to know where to look to see the potential. For example, in the dirt of a Siberian cave containing a 20,000-year-old wapiti tooth.
The tooth of this ancient elk, it turns out, was worn as jewelry by one of our distant ancestors, a woman who, based on her genetics and our previous assumptions, shouldn’t even have been in that general vicinity. That’s cute, you say — even Stone-Age ladies liked bling. But that’s not the point.