“Unearthing the Past: A 3,600-Year-Old Woman’s Face Revealed from Just a Single Molar!”
In 2018, anthropologist Hideaki Kanzawa of Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science extracted DNA from one of the ancient woman’s teeth. The results showed she was an elderly woman with frizzy hair and freckles, a high alcohol tolerance, a fatty diet, smelly armpits, and wet earwax.
That latter bit of evidence may seem trivial but has actually unlocked quite a bit of significant contextual information surrounding her people. For instance, these traits indicate that the Jomōn people would have diverged from Asian mainland populations around 38,000 to 18,000 years ago. From there, the Jomōn people would have evolved to possess vastly different biological traits than their mainland counterparts.
Indeed, unlike the 95 percent of modern-day East Asians who have dry earwax, this woman developed a genetic variant responsible for making bother her armpits particularly smelly and her ear wax particularly wet.
The woman was shown to have dark curly hair, brown eyes, and a freckled face. She was likely predisposed to developing solar lentigo — an epidermal condition of dark patches on the skin resulting from too much time spent in the sun.
The Jomōn woman likely had a far higher alcohol tolerance than even Japan’s modern population. Stranger still, researchers found another variant in her DNA that supports the digestion of high-fat foods that is found also in Arctic peoples.
The National Museum of Nature and Science, TokyoThe woman’s genome was sequenced from DNA extracted from her tooth. It led to the discovery that the Jomōn people were distinct from their contemporary mainland counterparts in numerous ways.
According to the researchers’ report, this particular gene is prevalent in 70 percent of today’s Arctic population, but it is non-existent in any other demographic. As such, Dr. Kanzawa is confident that the Jomōn people mainly fished and hunted fatty animals on both land and sea.
Post Comment