Prehistorical internet site can be goldmines for artifacts , but they can also be very perplexing for scientists because they can contain a big routine of os and bone fragments from different coinage . Now a new proficiency can name human being bones even if there ’s only a tiny fragment leave .
An external inquiry team has develop " Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry " ( ZooMS ) – a technique that reveals the collagen peptide chronological succession in osseous tissue fragments , allow scientists to identify to which species a pearl once belong .
This proficiency was used at a central archeological site in Russia’sDenisova Cave , where the team was able to discover a single Neanderthal pearl from about 2,300 minuscule bone fragments from animals like mammoths , woolly-haired rhinos , wolves , and reindeer .
“ This is a real discovery , picture that we can now apply bioarchaeological method acting like ZooMS to search the archaeological disk and find even tiny fossil corpse , where there are protein that go , ” said team loss leader Professor Thomas Higham in astatement .
Study co - author Svante Pääbo and his chemical group from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig , Germany , were able to educe DNA and carbon - engagement the bone , happen that it belong to a Neanderthal who lived more than 50,000 geezerhood ago . According to the newspaper publisher , print inScientific Reports , the bone has window pane engrave on its surface , hint it might have gone through the stomach of a hyena before it was deposited in the cave .
The cave has been hailed as one of the most important site in understanding early human evolution . Due to environmental conditions in the cave , specimens tend to be preserved exceptionally well , allowing Pääbo and his team to hear a new species of human calledDenisovansin 2010 .
“ In the paleolithic period , where we have Neanderthals , Denisovans , and modern humanity , this is potentially very significant because if the fragments that we find are bountiful enough then we can date and analyze the desoxyribonucleic acid from the same osseous tissue , " add Professor Higham . “ One of the crowing challenges is in agreement what happened when New human beings and Neanderthals meet . We want to know over what point of time and where this happened . Fossils are the key , but for modern humans they are extremely rare in archaeological site . We hope that more work like this will yield more human bone stay . ”
