, but you might have to chew it to make it pliable enough to work with. Pitch is watertight and contains an antiseptic compound called betulin, so it’s great at preserving DNA. In fact, archaeologists in Scandinavia have found more
The detail we can extract with DNA turns a seriously unprepossessing artifact into a deeply personal link to life in the past. It also sheds light on the much larger cultural upheaval that was reshaping Lola’s world. While Lola was eating hazelnuts at the prehistoric settlement now called Syltholm, people from southwest Asia were spreading westward across Europe, bringing a new way of life with them: farming.
Around the time Lola lived in Denmark, the hunter-gatherer culture called Erlebolle gave way to the Funnel Beaker culture, a way of life built on farming and livestock. From archaeological data, we know that cultural change happened very quickly in Denmark, with people’s settlement patterns and ways of making a living changing almost overnight. But what we don’t know is whether that’s because new people moved in, displacing the old Erlebolle hunter-gatherers, or if it’s because the people already living in Denmark adopted new ideas.
Lola’s genome suggests that she’s not related to the Neolithic farmers who swept westward. And that implies that the newcomers didn’t immediately replace or absorb the hunter-gatherers who had been living in Denmark since the end of the Ice Age. In Lola’s day, it seems that at least a few of the old hunter-gatherer groups were still around, even if they’d adopted new ways of life. That lines up well with other genomic evidence from elsewhere in Europe, but it’s important not to draw firm conclusions based on a single genome.
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