Waking the dead. This was the actual title of a press release from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). What will the media of scientific weirdness make of this (not to mention the tabloids)? They’d make nothing of it; if they actually read the release. “Waking the dead” is a fanciful notion, something like a poet might use (while hung-over), to apply to the real story of reconstructing the genome of a man who died 4,000 years ago.

What actually happened was that researchers Professor Eske Willerslev and his PhD student Morten Rasmussen, from the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with genetic specialists in many parts of the world and especially China, were able to find a lock of hair, the only remains from an inhabitant of Greenland of some 4,000 years ago. They used the hair to reconstruct the genome. As modern genetic sequencing improves, the price and time required for running a complete genome has come way down in recent years. This one only took a few months and two private grants. The hard part was the patching of damaged DNA sequences and splicing together of the entire genome.

Then came the fun part: We don’t know much about what genes do what, but we do know some things and from those we can extrapolate other things. For example…

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.

[Source: University of Copenhagen]

This description hardly qualifies for ‘making the man come alive,’ but it’s a start (in a literary sense). Professor Willerslev is developing a good reputation for paleological ‘firsts’ in genetics, as last year he successfully reconstructed the genome of a wooly mammoth. This is, of course, NOT Jurassic Park. This is the painstaking reconstruction of DNA, its analysis, and depending on the state-of-knowledge, a bit of a sleuthing exercise to ascribe characteristics (phenotype) to the person. Incomplete as it may be, this is a big step in providing other researchers a literal map from which to build new knowledge about the peoples from the past.