Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The scientists call for more careful stewardship of DNA-rich bone specimens to ensure that they remain available to multiple research teams to study.
They point to the example of a newly established centre in Israel that will act as a national clearing house to curate animal bones from archaeological sites, so that many researchers can access samples for genetic analysis.
Makarewicz and her colleagues are particularly concerned about a portion of bone in the inner ear, the petrous, that is especially rich in ancient DNA. In the past few years, geneticists have accrued hundreds of archaeological samples β many of them petrous bones β from sites around the world and used them for blockbuster ancient-genomics papers that have charted the spread of agriculture , languages and little-understood cultures.
In , his team published the first ancient-genome study to sequence the DNA of more than individuals 1 ; it charted a massive Bronze Age migration originating in the steppes of Russia and Ukraine.
David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and another leading ancient-DNA researcher , says preserving archaeological samples is crucial.
