This is the best summary I could come up with:

By using a form of mass spectrometry, which let them read the “molecular barcode” of biological samples, the team found that while most of the Scythian leather came from sheep, goats, cows and horses, two of the quivers contained pieces of human skin.

Analysis of stable isotopes preserved in human bones and animal teeth has allowed scientists to track the movement of a single girl from Germany to Denmark in the bronze age, trace the importation of baboons into ancient Egypt from the horn of Africa and follow a woolly mammoth from Indiana on its annual migrations across the midwest 13,000 years ago.

Using DNA, one lab determined that animal skulls unearthed in a medieval settlement beneath modern-day Kyiv belonged to walruses killed in the waters between Canada and Greenland, from where they were shipped 2,500 miles to be used for making jewellery and chess pieces.

New techniques of isotope analysis based on the close examination of the chemical elements inside human teeth and bone fragments are allowing scientists to track the movement of people not just across generations, but within single lifetimes.

Combined with DNA analysis, this has produced a stream of intimate (if fragmentary) stories from the deep past: an African boy who grew up on the shores of the Red Sea and died young in Roman Serbia; a girl from the bronze age born in southern Germany and sent north (to marry?

in Denmark; a young Sarmatian – one of the heirs to Herodotus’s Scythians – raised in the shadow of the Caucasus mountains, who went west in the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius while still a child, and died in Britain, laid to rest in an unmarked grave in a ditch at the edge of a farm in what is now Cambridgeshire.

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