London, Feb 11 (IANS) Scientists have reconstructed in detail the first ever nuclear genome of an ancient human being.
The discovery was made by analysing a tuft of hair that belonged to a man from the Saqqaq culture from northwestern Greenland 4,000 years ago. The scientists have named the ancient human “Inuk”, which means “man” or “human” in Greenlandic.

Professor Eske Willerslev and his doctoral student Morten Rasmussen, from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum (NHM), University of Copenhagen, Denmark, led the international team of scientists.

Willerslev discovered the existence of the hair tuft by coincidence after several unsuccessful attempts to find early human remains in Greenland.

“I was speaking with the director of the NHM…Dr. Morten Meldgaard, when we started discussing the early peopling of the Arctic,” Willerslev recalls.

“Meldgaard, who had participated in several excavations in Greenland, told me about a large tuft of hair, which was found during an excavation in north-western Greenland in the 1980s..”

Willerslev, 38, and his team grabbed international attention last year when they reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genomes of a woolly mammoth and an ancient human.

However, the current discovery is the first time scientists have been able to reconstruct the 80 percent of the nuclear genome that is possible to retrieve from fossil remains.

“We analysed the hair for DNA using various techniques and found it to be from a human male. For several months, we were uncertain as to whether our efforts would be fruitful,” Willerslev says, according to an NHM release.

“However, through the hard work of a large international team, we finally managed to sequence the first complete genome of an extinct human,” he adds.

The innovative technique can be applied to museum materials and ancient remains found in nature and can help reconstruct human phenotypic traits of extinct cultures from where only limited remains have been recovered.

The results is slated for publication in Nature.