Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo

• Main Authors: Rasmussen, M., Li, Y., Lindgreen, S., Pedersen, J.S., Albrechtsen, A., Moltke, I., Metspalu, M., Metspalu, E., Kivisild, T., Gupta, R., Bertalan, M., Nielsen, K., Gilbert, M.T.P., Wang, Y., Raghavan, M., Campos, P.F., Kamp, H.M., Wilson, A.S., Gledhill, A., Tridico, S., Bunce, M., Lorenzen, E.D., Binladen, J., Guo, X., Zhao, J., Zhang, X., Zhang, H., Li, Z., Chen, M., Orlando, L., Kristiansen, K., Bak, M., Tommerup, N., Bendixen, C., Pierre, T.L., Grønnow, B., Meldgaard, M., Andreasen, C., Fedorova, S.A., Osipova, L.P., Higham, T.F.G., Ramsey, C.B., Hansen, T.O., Nielsen, F.C., Crawford, M.H., Brunak, S., Sicheritz-Pontén, T., Villems, R., Nielsen, R., Krogh, A., Wang, J., Willerslev, E.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2010
• Subjects: Greenland; eskimo*; inuit; permafrost; Siberia
• Online Access: https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/5001/

We report here the genome sequence of an ancient human. Obtained from 4,000-year-old permafrost-preserved hair, the genome represents a male individual from the first known culture to settle in Greenland. Sequenced to an average depth of 20Ã-, we recover 79% of the diploid genome, an amount close to the practical limit of current sequencing technologies. We identify 353,151 high-confidence single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), of which 6.8% have not been reported previously. We estimate raw read contamination to be no higher than 0.8%. We use functional SNP assessment to assign possible phenotypic characteristics of the individual that belonged to a culture whose location has yielded only trace human remains. We compare the high-confidence SNPs to those of contemporary populations to find the populations most closely related to the individual. This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit.