Here’s an interesting story from Nature. Apparently, researchers are beginning to mine the dirt of ancient caves for human DNA:
Bones and teeth aren’t the only ways to learn about extinct human relatives. For the first time, researchers have recovered ancient-human DNA without having obvious remains — just dirt from the caves the hominins lived in. The technique opens up a new way to probe prehistory.
From sediments in European and Asian caves, a team led by geneticist Viviane Slon and molecular biologist Matthias Meyer, both at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced genomes of cell structures called mitochondria from Neanderthals and another hominin group, the Denisovans. Their work is published in Science.
That highlights a point I think I’ve made before about treasure-hunters. Schliemann wasn’t a scientist or a hero. He was a vandal.
True enough, but before him historians dismissed Troy as myth.