The genetics of the dead is a science moving at exhilarating speed, and reports of bones replete with new sources of DNA are being published on a weekly basis. But in April 2017, Viviane Slon, Svante Pääbo, and a Spanish team managed to do something almost magical. They had been to seven caves known to have once been homes to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They took sediment samples and succeeded in extracting wisps of mitochondrial DNA directly from the dirt. There in the cave floors, they found ghostly traces of the genes of woolly rhinos, cave bears, mammoths, and humans. We can now find the
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