And it was not what anyone expected.

The Science Of Ancient DNA

To understand what the Mal’ta boy’s DNA told scientists, it is necessary to understand something about how ancient DNA works — what can be extracted from very old bones, what it can reveal, and where its limits lie.

DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid — is the molecular record of inheritance.

Every cell in a living organism contains DNA, which carries the instructions for building and operating that organism and which is passed, in modified form, to offspring.

Because DNA is shared between parents and children, between siblings, between members of the same population, it records the history of relatedness — who is connected to whom, and how closely.