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From TheScientist.com
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By Bob Grant
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Trash to treasure
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As Anna Dhody tells it, sometime in 2000 or 2001 she and her supervisor Steven LeBlanc, director of collections at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, were discussing ways to obtain ancient DNA from secondary archeological finds over lunch. Recalling her training as a forensic anthropologist, Dhody, now curator of the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, mentioned how things like cigarette butts or discarded coffee cups from crime scenes often yield DNA. "Why can't we use modern day forensic technology to solve ancient mysteries?" she asked.
The scientists thought about the hundreds of bundles of chewed yucca fibers, called quids, gathering dust at the Peabody. Quid chewing was quite in vogue among Native Southwesterners some 800-2,400 years ago, and these fibrous clumps litter archeological sites. Could these quids provide new clues about the humans that spat them out hundreds or thousands of years ago?
It was certainly a novel concept. (LeBlanc says he doesn't recall the Harvard Club lunch very clearly. "I can't quite remember" how the idea took shape, he says.) Quids were long disregarded as little more than ancient garbage - interesting enough to collect, but not investigate - by archaeologists. Looking for DNA from ancient quids was "something that very few people would have thought of," says Patty Jo Watson, archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
For the first time, scientists have extracted DNA from ancient artifacts.LeBlanc tapped the Peabody's sizeable quid collection, which came from desert caves scattered throughout the Southwest, and Dhody developed a set of protocols for extracting DNA from the cores. The team wasn't even thinking about data - their goal was just to see if it was even possible to extract DNA from these ancient specimens.
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The Scientist
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