If the F.B.I.'s scientists could extract DNA from the 4,000-year-old mummy, they would add a powerful tool to their forensics arsenal and also unlock a new way of deciphering Egypt’s ancient past https://t.co/a1em2dIpBG — NYT Science (@NYTScience) April 2, 2018 
 
 A team of forensic scientists has managed to extract DNA from a 4,000-year-old mummy, and their finding has solved a century-old mystery of its ransacked tomb. 
 
 The Egyptian mummy wasn't a fully preserved corpse, but rather a decapitated, mutilated, bandage-wrapped head that archaeologists found on top of a coffin when they excavated a tomb back in 1915. And that was the source of the mystery. 
 
 As the researchers explained in a paper published March 1 in the journal Genes, the tomb belonged to an Egyptian Middle Kingdom governor named Djehutynakht. But by the time modern scientists found the tomb, it had been ransacked; it was robbed in ancient times. In an article describing the discovery, The New York Times reported that the robbers had set the place on fire "to cover their tracks." [Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries] 
 
 All that remained of the tomb's occupants was a dismembered torso in one corner of the tomb and a head placed on top of Djehutynakht's coffin. For more than a hundred years, researchers have wondered and disagreed about whether these mummified remains belonged to Djehutynakht himself or to his wife. 
 
 Deepening the mystery, the head had been altered during the mummification process, with several bones removed from the jaw and cheek in an effort to enable the deceased to eat and drink in the afterlife, the Times reported. Those bones might have offered clues as to whether the body was male or female. 
 
 That left DNA analysis. But extracting DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies, after centuries in hot, DNA-degrading environments, had never been achieved before. The Times reported that earlier attempts failed or produced contaminated results. 
 
 This is a good article by @SciFleur . You should read it. 
 
 
 
 But I can't be the only person who looks at this picture of the mummy's head and kind of sees a roast chicken. 
 
 
 
 Sorry (not sorry).https://t.co/28hbBGLeCe pic.twitter.com/AJjznpfodi — Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis (@KendraWrites) April 2, 2018 
 
 Still, FBI forensic researchers gave it a shot. They had access because the head, along with many artifacts from the tomb, had long since made its way to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Shipping artifacts out of Egypt would be illegal today under Egyptian law.) They drilled into a molar extracted from the head "in pristine condition" back in 2009, producing 105 milligrams (0.004 ounces) of tooth dust. After exposing the dust to a liquid mixture designed to copy and amplify existing DNA, they found that it came from a biological male. The head, in other words, most likely belonged to Djehutynakht and not his wife. A team at the Department of Homeland Security, working with a smaller tooth-dust sample, later confirmed the results. In both cases, the DNA was damaged, demonstrating that it came from the ancient mummy and not modern contamination. 
 
 Interestingly, it remains unclear which Djehutynakht the head (and tomb) belonged to. Two governors with that name ruled an area call Hare Nome, and, the researchers wrote, "while they shared the same name (which means Thoth [the main local deity] is Strong), there is no evidence they were related." 
 
 Originally published on Live Science. ||||| Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO 
 
 Hannes Schroeder snaps on two pairs of blue latex gloves, then wipes his hands with a solution of bleach. In front of him is a large Tupperware box full of plastic bags that each contain sea water and a piece of red-stained bone. He lifts one out and inspects its contents as several archaeologists hover behind, waiting for his verdict. They’re hoping he can pull off a feat never attempted before — DNA analysis on someone who has been under the sea for 2,000 years. 
 
 Through the window, sunlight sparkles on cobalt water. The researchers are on the tiny Greek island of Antikythera, a 10-minute boat ride from the wreckage of a 2,000-year-old merchant ship. Discovered by sponge divers in 1900, the wreck was the first ever investigated by archaeologists. Its most famous bounty to date has been a surprisingly sophisticated clockwork device that modelled the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets in the sky — dubbed1 the ‘Antikythera mechanism’. 
 
 But on 31 August this year, investigators made another groundbreaking discovery: a human skeleton, buried under around half a metre of pottery sherds and sand. “We’re thrilled,” says Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and co-director of the excavations team. “We don’t know of anything else like it.” 
 
 Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO 
 
 Within days of the find, Foley invited Schroeder, an expert in ancient-DNA analysis from the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, to assess whether genetic material might be extracted from the bones. On his way to Antikythera, Schroeder was doubtful. But as he removes the bones from their bags he is pleasantly surprised. The material is a little chalky, but overall looks well preserved. “It doesn’t look like bone that’s 2,000 years old,” he says. Then, sifting through several large pieces of skull, he finds both petrous bones — dense nuggets behind the ear that preserve DNA better than other parts of the skeleton or the teeth. “It’s amazing you guys found that,” Schroeder says. “If there’s any DNA, then from what we know, it’ll be there.” 
 
 Schroeder agrees to go ahead with DNA extraction when permission is granted by the Greek authorities. It would take about a week to find out whether the sample contains any DNA, he says: then perhaps a couple of months to sequence it and analyse the results. 
 
 For Schroeder, the discovery gives him the chance to push the boundaries of ancient-DNA studies. So far, most have been conducted on samples from cold climates such as northern Europe. “I’ve been trying to push the application of ancient DNA into environments where people don’t usually look for DNA,” he says. (He was part of a team that last year published the first Mediterranean ancient genome, of a Neolithic individual from Spain2.) 
 
 Foley and the archaeologists, meanwhile, are elated by the chance to learn more about the people on board the first-century bc ship, which carried luxury items from the eastern Mediterranean, probably intended for wealthy buyers in Rome. 
 
 Rare discovery 
 
 The skeleton discovery is a rare find, agrees Mark Dunkley, an underwater archaeologist from the London-based heritage organization Historic England. Unless covered by sediment or otherwise protected, the bodies of shipwreck victims are usually swept away and decay, or are eaten by fish. Complete skeletons have been recovered from younger ships, such as the sixteenth-century English warship the Mary Rose and the seventeenth-century Vasa in Sweden. Both sank in mud, close to port. But “the farther you go back, the rarer it is”, says Dunkley. 
 
 Only a handful of examples of human remains have been found on ancient wrecks, says archaeologist Dimitris Kourkoumelis of the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, who collaborates with Foley. They include a skull found inside a Roman soldier’s helmet near Sardinia, and a skeleton reportedly discovered inside a sunken sarcophagus near the Greek island of Syrna (although the bones disappeared before the find could be confirmed). 
 
 Michael Tsimperopoulos, EUA/WHOI/ARGO 
 
 In fact, the best-documented example is the Antikythera wreck itself: scattered bones were found by the French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau, who excavated here in 1976. Argyro Nafplioti, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, concluded that the remains came from at least four individuals, including a young man, a woman and a teenager of unknown sex3. 
 
 At the wreck site, only broken pots now remain on the sea floor — the sponge divers recovered all artefacts visible on the seabed in 1900–01. But Foley thinks that much of the ship’s cargo may be buried under the sediment. His team, including expert technical divers and members of the Greek archaeological service, relocated and mapped the 50-metre-deep site before beginning their own excavations in 2014. They have found items such as wine jars, glassware, two bronze spears from statues, gold jewellery and table jugs used by the crew (see ‘Ancient bounty’). The divers have also recovered ship components including enormous anchors and a teardrop-shaped lead weight, found in June, that may be the first known example of what ancient texts describe as a ‘war dolphin’ — a defensive weapon carried by merchant vessels to smash hostile ships. 
 
 Source: Stefan Williams, Australian Centre for Field Robotics; Alex Tourtas, EUA/WHOI/ARGO 
 
 The skeleton uncovered in August consists of a partial skull with three teeth, two arm bones, several rib pieces and two femurs, all apparently from the same person. Foley’s team plans further excavations to see whether more bones are still under the sand. 
 
 That so many individuals have been found at Antikythera — when most wrecks yield none — may be partly because few other wrecks have been as exhaustively investigated. But the researchers think it also reveals something about how the ship sank. This was a huge vessel for its time, perhaps more than 40 metres long, says Foley, with multiple decks and many people on board. The wreck is close to shore, at the foot of the island’s steep cliffs. He concludes that a storm smashed the ship against the rocks so that it broke up and sank before people had a chance to react. “We think it was such a violent wrecking event, people got trapped below decks.” 
 
 Mediterranean mystery 
 
 Michael Tsimperopoulos, EUA/WHOI/ARGO 
 
 The individuals found at Antikythera could be from the crew, which would probably have consisted of 15–20 people on a ship this size. Greek and Roman merchant ships also commonly carried passengers, and sometimes slaves. One reason people get trapped inside shipwrecks is if they are chained, points out Dunkley. “The crew would be able to get off relatively fast. Those shackled would have no opportunity to escape.” Intriguingly, the recently discovered bones were surrounded by corroded iron objects, so far unidentified; the iron oxide has stained the bones amber red. 
 
 Schroeder says that because ancient underwater remains are so rare, DNA analysis on such samples using state-of-the-art techniques has barely been tried. (Analyses were conducted on skeletons from the Mary Rose and the Vasa, but specialists no longer see those methods — based on amplifying DNA using a method called PCR — as reliable, because it is too difficult to distinguish ancient DNA from modern contamination.) Exceptions include analyses on 8,000-year-old wheat from a submerged site off the English coast (although these results have been questioned because the DNA did not show the expected age-related damage4), and mitochondrial DNA from a 12,000-year-old skeleton found in a freshwater sinkhole in Mexico5. 
 
 Anthony Ayiomamitis 
 
 Finding undisturbed remains such as those at Antikythera is crucial because it offers the opportunity to extract any DNA in the best possible condition. Previously salvaged bones are not ideal for analysis because they have often been washed, treated with conservation mater­ials or kept in warm conditions (all of which can destroy fragile DNA), or handled in a way that contaminates them. 
 
 Schroeder guesses from the skeleton’s fairly robust femur and unworn teeth that the individual was a young man. As well as confirming the person’s gender, DNA from the Antikythera bones could provide information about characteristics from hair and eye colour to ancestry and geographic origin. In the past few years, modern genome sequences have revealed that genetic variation in populations mirrors geography, says Schroeder. He and others are now starting to look at how ancient individuals fit on that map, to reconstruct past population movements. Would the shipwreck victim look more Greek-Italian or Near Eastern, he wonders? 
 
 Over dinner, the researchers decide to nickname the bones’ owner Pamphilos, after a name found neatly scratched on a wine cup from the wreck. “Your mind starts spinning,” says Schroeder. “Who were those people who crossed the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago? Maybe one of them was the astronomer who owned the mechanism.” ||||| Please enable Javascript to watch this video 
 
 SALT LAKE CITY -- Scientists in Salt Lake City could help crack a case in Massachusetts that investigators are having a tough time solving. 
 
 It surrounds the death of an unidentified toddler, known as Baby Doe, who was found dumped in a trash bag in June. Now, the team at IsoForensics is aiding police in their efforts to identify the child. 
 
 “We’ve pretty much brought all hands on deck for this one,” said Lesley Chesson, IsoForensics president. 
 
 Several weeks ago, police sent Chesson’s company a piece of the girl’s hair, as well as a tooth. Since then, they have been analyzing the sample’s isotopes, which act as a person’s chemical characteristics throughout life. 
 
 “What you’re eating, what you’re drinking, that’s recorded in your tissues immediately,” explained Chesson. “You’re recording the isotopes of your drinking water into your hair, into your bones.” 
 
 That information has enabled Chesson and her staff to paint a general picture of someone’s life. In the case of Baby Doe, they’ve been able to determine, based on the water she had been drinking, that she likely lived in the New England area, at one point. 
 
 “The hair of the little girl will give us a tape recorder of her last year of life and where she moved, if she did move,” said Brett Tipple, a senior research scientist at the company. 
 
 Those details have proven critical in past cases in Utah. In 2012, IsoForensics assisted police in identifying “Saltair Sally,” who they later learned was 20-year-old Nikole Bakoles. Her body was discovered in 2000, but it was not until Chesson’s team analyzed samples of the remains that police could determine her identity. 
 
 “Saltair Sally had been traveling,” said Chesson. “We’d known that she’d be in and out of the Salt Lake area, and then had traveled throughout the Intermountain West and Pacific Northwest.” 
 
 Going forward, the information may even get more detailed. Through testing of strontium isotopes in Baby Doe’s hair, Tipple explained they can determine the type of bedrock that exists where she lived. When combining that data with the information about her drinking water, they can possibly narrow the field from New England to a smaller area. 
 
 “It could narrow it down quite a bit,” said Tipple. 
 
 They except it could be a few more weeks before the results from recent strontium tests are released.
– It has to rank among the less usual undertakings doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital had attempted: In 2009 they removed a molar from a severed Egyptian mummy's head via an endoscope with grasping forceps they inserted through the neck. The tooth was a hopeful clue in a nearly century-old mystery—one that still wouldn't be solved for years to come. The head (see it here) was discovered in 1915 in Deir el-Bersha, south of Cairo, in a room built for a governor named Djehutynakht and his wife 4,000 years ago. It had been looted by grave robbers, and the identity of the head—was it Djehutynakht's or his wife's?—remained unclear. A DNA test could provide the answer, but no mummy of that age had given up usable, reliable DNA, and "the ancient DNA community had largely given up on the testing" of such remains, per a report in the journal Genes. The molar was their best bet, and scientists tried and failed to get it to give up its DNA. Then, in 2016, the tooth made its way to the FBI's Dr. Odile Loreille, a forensic scientist with a long history of working with old and ancient DNA; the New York Times reports she has identified Korean War victims, a 2-year-old who died on the Titanic, and the remains of two children of Russian Tsar Nicholas II. She managed to retrieve a tiny bit of powder—just 0.004 ounces, per LiveScience—from the tooth's core, and the ratio of chromosomes it contained proved it was male DNA: Governor Djehutynakht. The Times sums up the significance: "In doing so she had help[ed] establish that ancient Egyptian DNA could be extracted from mummies." (This Egyptian coffin is "dowdy," but the inside is astonishing.)