Using just four hairs and a few small fragments of bone from an ancient man discovered in the permafrost of western Greenland, a research team from the University of Copenhagen have sequenced about 80% of the ancient man's genome. 
 
Eske Willerslev, director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, and his team, led by Morten Rasmussen, were able to sequence about three billion base pairs of the ancient man now referred to as "Inuk"- producing much finer resolution than has been extracted through previous genetic studies of Neandertals and ancient mammoths.
 
The findings are published in the February 11 edition of the journal Nature.
 
The team notes that the DNA gives strong indication of some of Inuk's physical traits. "The guy had most likely brown eyes, brown skin - as well as a genetic predisposition for baldness. Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young," Willerslev said.
 
In addition to painting a picture of how the early man looked, Inuk's genetic code also reveals a great deal about early human migration. The man lived among the Saqqaq people, the earliest known culture in southern Greenland that lasted from around 2500 BC until about 800 BC. Scientists have disagreed on who these people were - whether they descended from the peoples who crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 to 40,000 years ago to settle the New World or whether they were more recent immigrants.
 
"People have been puzzled by the relation of these inhabitants," Willerslev said. Two subsequent waves of cultures arrived in the Arctic area, and this new genetic study shows that Inuk's group, of the Saqqaq culture, was of the earliest and does not appear to have intermixed with later inhabitants. "We can show that this individual was neither a direct relative of Inuits or Native Americans," Willerslev said. In fact, Rasmussen noted, "their closest living relatives are a population living in Siberia now."
 
Such a definitive finding might clear up some of the mystery surrounding this culture's origins, which has been described as "hotly debated." But it still does not reveal just how or why the Saqqaq people came to Greenland in the first place—or what caused their eventual demise.
 
Abstract:  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7282/abs/nature08835.html