The 24,000-Year-Old Boy Buried Beneath A Stone Slab With 120 Beads And Mammoth-Ivory Jewelry — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Hidden Source Of Native American Ancestry

Cold slows bacterial activity.

Cold slows the chemical reactions that break molecular bonds.

And the bones of animals and humans that have been locked in permafrost or near-permafrost conditions can retain fragments of degraded but still-readable DNA for periods that, a generation ago, scientists would have said were impossible.

The Mal’ta boy’s bones — recovered from a burial that had been in cold Siberian earth for 24,000 years — retained enough degraded DNA for meaningful analysis.

The team that conducted the ancient DNA analysis was led by Eske Willerslev of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, one of the world’s leading researchers in ancient genomics, and included collaborators from multiple institutions.