pit of bones

If I had taken a straw poll among anthropologists 10 years ago asking them how far genetic research would come in the next decade, I doubt anyone would have come close to predicting the big impact fossil DNA work would come to have. Back then, this nascent field was bogged down with fundamental issues like distinguishing authentic DNA from contamination. Simply recovering enough nuclear DNA to say anything sensible at all about human origins would have been a really big achievement. But following some remarkable technical developments in that time, including next generation sequencing, ancient DNA research is beginning to come of age. And it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s dramatically rewriting our understanding of the human evolutionary story