>Today, scientists routinely map the genomes of the long dead, from Neanderthals to medieval kings. What they’re finding out, says British geneticist Adam Rutherford in A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, rewrites the story of human life on Earth—with some unexpected twists.
>Speaking from the BBC studio in London where he hosts the weekly radio program Inside Science, Rutherford explains how the development of farming changed human biology; why the most important story our genes tell is that we are all family, despite race or tribe; and why it's not genes that turn people into mass shooters.
>If you think of DNA simply as a data storage device, the data it stores is biological information. In us, it’s three billion letters of individual code, or 20,000 genes. Paleogenetics is the study of our DNA from things that have been dead for a long time—paleo simply means old. It’s new because we’ve only invented the technology to do it in the last 10 years and, in a serious way, in the last five years.
>What’s interesting is that DNA is far more stable than a digital disk or tape. Under the right conditions, DNA will last for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years trapped inside the bones of a person or organism. With the advent of our ability to get it out, we can do genome studies on creatures that have been dead for thousands of centuries.
>The first big landmark came in 2009, when DNA was extracted from the bone of a Neanderthal. From that we have the whole genome sequence of a human species different from us, which answered one of the big questions that had dogged paleontologists: How did we interact with Neanderthals? And, more specifically, did we have sex with them?
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