How to use DNA analysis to assess health in the past. Applications for New World soft-tissues.

Summary

Human remains can offer many insights into our past culture, especially about our attitudes to death. However, how we lived is a much larger question. Whilst paleopathology can give us some understanding of the diseases that affected our ancestors, DNA evidence can give us so much more.

Mummification, either artificial or natural, of human remains is highly variable, for example frozen ice-mummies such as the Tyrolean Iceman have a very different thermal history to heat desiccated mummies such as found in pre-dynastic Egypt. This can affect DNA preservation and amplification. In the same way, soft tissues from the Arctic and southern Peru can not be considered as similar test samples in terms of treatment.

However, non-skeletal material is a valuable resource as many pathogens are concentrated in organs rather than in bone, and thus, if DNA preservation and extraction issues and amplification inhibition can be overcome, we can expand an exciting field of archaeological research.

Here we shall present what needs to be undertaken to ensure that any DNA preserved in tissues can be studied, and what these studies can reveal about our past health.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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