The contamination problem in ancient DNA research is not merely technical.

It has a history of embarrassments that has made the field appropriately cautious.

The early Egyptian mummy DNA results of the 1980s and 1990s were largely or entirely contamination.

Results from other ancient DNA work in the 1990s were sometimes similarly compromised, leading to papers that needed to be retracted or substantially revised when better authentication methods revealed that the published sequences were modern.

This history has made the field develop increasingly stringent standards for authentication, and the NUE001 paper meets and exceeds those standards.