The first successful recovery of ancient DNA from human remains was announced in 1985, when researchers extracted a small amount of genetic material from an ancient Egyptian mummy.

But this early work was limited — the amounts of DNA were tiny, the sequences were short, and the risk of contamination from modern human DNA was enormous.

For years, ancient DNA research proceeded slowly, hampered by these technical limitations.

The revolution began in the mid-2000s and accelerated dramatically in the 2010s, driven by two related technological developments.

The first was the development of next-generation sequencing technology, which could sequence millions of DNA fragments simultaneously rather than laboriously reading sequences one at a time.

This increased both the speed and the power of DNA analysis by orders of magnitude, making it possible to recover and analyze genetic material from samples that would have been completely intractable using earlier methods.