this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


One of the challenges of working with ancient DNA samples is that damage accumulates over time, breaking up the structure of the double helix into ever smaller fragments.

In the samples we've worked with, these fragments scatter and mix with contaminants, making reconstructing a genome a large technical challenge.

Since chromosomes are millions of base pairs long, it was thought that this would inevitably destroy their structure, as many of the fragments would simply diffuse away.

So, they set out to test this using mammoth tissues, obtained from a sample termed YakInf that's roughly 50,000 years old.

The challenge is that the molecular techniques we use to probe chromosomes take place in liquid solutions, where fragments would just drift away from each other in any case.

So, the team focused on an approach termed Hi-C, which specifically preserves information about which bits of DNA were close to each other.


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