Professor Eske Willerslev and his PhD student Morten Rasmussen, from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, The Natural History Museum at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, led the international team of scientists responsible for the findings.

Professor 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% of the nuclear genome that is possible to retrieve from fossil remains. From the genomic sequences, the team has managed to construct a picture of a male individual who lived in Greenland 4,000 years ago and belonged to the first culture to settle in the New World Arctic.

The discovery was made by analysing a tuft of hair that belonged to a man from the Saqqaq culture from north-western Greenland 4,000 years ago. The scientists have named the ancient human “Inuk”, which means “man” or “human” in Greenlandic. Although Inuk is more closely related to contemporary north-eastern Siberian tribes than to modern Inuits of the present day New World Arctic, the scientists wants to acknowledge that the discovery was made in Greenland.

Professor 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 Natural History Museum in Denmark, 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 1980′s and now stored at the National Museum in Denmark.

“After the Greenland National Museum and Archives granted permission, 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. However, through the hard work of a large international team, we finally managed to sequence the first complete genome of an extinct human.”, Willerslev says.

Willerslev adds: “It was crucial that a private person, Fredrik Paulsen, chairman of the medical company Ferring, became interested in the project and provided the necessary funding to run some pilot tests, and that The Lundbeck Foundation of Denmark, quickly followed up providing substantial economic support to complete the project”.

“It shows how crucial private funding is to basic science these days. Without these private donors it would have taken us a lot longer to sequence the first ancient human genome”.

The reconstruction serves as blueprint that scientists can use to give a description of how the pre-historic Greenlander, Inuk, looked – including his tendency to baldness, dry earwax, brown eyes, dark skin, the blood type A+, shovel-shaped front teeth, and that he was genetically adapted to cold temperatures, and to what extend he was predisposed to certain illnesses. This is important as besides four small pieces of bone and hair, no human remains have been found of the first people that settled the New World Arctic. Willerslev’s team can also reveal that Inuk’s ancestors crossed into the New World from north-eastern Siberia between 4,400 and 6,400 years ago in a migration wave that was independent of those of Native Americans and Inuit ancestors. Thus, Inuk and his people left no dependence behind among contemporary indigenous people of the New World. Continue reading →