The worlds of ancient and modern DNA exploration have collided in spectacular fashion in the past few months. Last week saw the publication of a long-awaited draft genome of the Neanderthal, an archaic hominin from about 40,000 years ago. Just three months earlier, researchers in Denmark reported the genome of a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq Palaeo-Eskimo that was plucked from the Greenland permafrost and sequenced in China using the latest technology.rnAs researchers compare these ancient genomes with the ever-expanding number from today's humans, they expect to gain insights into human evolution and migration - with more discoveries to come as they decipher DNA from other branches of the human evolutionary tree. "For the first time, ancient and modern genetic research is going hand in hand," says Eske Willerslev, whose team at the University of Copenhagen led the Palaeo-Eskimo sequencing project. "It is really a fantastic time."
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