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Evolutionary genetics

A tour de force of ancient DNA analysis

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 26, page 375 (2025)Cite this article

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By the mid-1990s, the field of ancient DNA was starting to drift into the doldrums. The Jurassic Park popcorn was going stale, and the difficulties of working at the recovery limits of PCR technology, on genetic material that was preserved unpredictably and often irreproducibly, had taken its toll on public and scientific interest in the field. In particular, the inability to apply ancient DNA technology much beyond the mitochondrial genome meant that, although broad classes of interesting questions could be identified — how have these populations adapted, migrated and mixed over time; what did this person look like; what was this organism most closely related to — most specific problems were intractable.

In their 1997 paper, Krings et al. identified a problem that was not only tractable, but also very important: how was our species (Homo sapiens) related to a similar but recently extinct group of hominids, the Neanderthals? The two groups had overlapped in Europe until around 30,000 years ago. Were Neanderthals, as many suspected, an unrelated group who had little or no input into the European genome? Or had the two groups hybridized? Or was a less popular proposal correct: that Neanderthals were in fact the ancestors of Europeans, challenging the ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis, which holds that all modern humans descend from an ancestral population that migrated from Africa more than 60,000 years ago? In addressing these questions, this publication did much to revive interest in and development of ancient DNA as a field of study.

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  1. The Natural History Museum, London, UK

    Ian Barnes

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  1. Ian Barnes
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Correspondence to Ian Barnes.

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Barnes, I. A tour de force of ancient DNA analysis. Nat Rev Genet 26, 375 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-025-00838-x

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