In 2010, extraordinary circumstances allowed geneticists to reconstruct the first full genome of an ancient human: the DNA came from a hairball, frozen 4,000 years in Greenland soil. Since then, methods have improved so much in cost and efficiency that individual papers now report genomic data from hundreds of dead people (here, here, here). Ancient DNA (aDNA) has now been published from well over 2,000 human ancestors, stretching as far back as 430,000 years ago.
But around 70 percent of those sequences are from Eurasia, where cold temperatures favor DNA preservation and considerable archaeological research has occurred. For researchers interested in the genetic history of Europe and Asia, there are plenty of excavated skeletons, sitting in museums and other collections, and there’s a good chance those bones hold appreciable DNA.
The situation is different in Africa — the place where Homo sapiens originated some 300,000 years ago and has continued diversifying ever since. Despite Africa’s prominence in the human story, so far only 30 ancient genomes between 300 and 15,000 years old have been published from the continent.
