Beth Shapiro

And also things like bacteria and microbes get in there and chew up the DNA to recycle the animal to the next generation or plant or whatever.

And so the DNA that we get in an old thing, like a mammoth bone, is really short fragments, like maybe 30 or 40 or 50 letters of DNA long.

In comparison, if I were to take a swab from my cheek and sequence that, I could get strings that are hundreds of millions of letters long.

This is living DNA.

So ancient DNA is in really crap condition.

And it's also mixed with stuff.

So if I extract DNA from a mammoth.

I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA.

I'll probably get some of my DNA because I touched that mammoth bone.

I'll get DNA from whoever else touched that thing.

This has been a real problem in archaeology because we're trying to get DNA from humans, but we are humans.

And so we touch these things and then I don't know if it's my DNA or if that thing DNA.

Yeah, or dropping an eyelash.

Went in my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world.

We have these really, it's like working in a virus lab where you're scared of everything, but we turn it around.

So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out.

We don't want any air coming in.

We wear these suits where it looks like we're terrified, you know, with a face mask and hair net and we're totally covered and we bleach everything.

It's not because we're afraid of those bones.

We're afraid that we're going to get our DNA in that bone and then we're not going to be able to do our work.