Beth Shapiro

Yeah.

So it took that.

And the ability to amplify those tiny little pieces of DNA for us to really figure out that we could get DNA out of things.

For a long time, people thought we were never going to get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem.

We touch a bone, we're just going to get human DNA, and we're never going to be able to know the difference.

But then with PCR and with the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish, we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is probably one of the crowning achievements of my field.

Ancient DNA.

Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for this.

Bones, different bones.

The very first Neanderthal genome sequence was actually a mixture of several bones because, you know, there wasn't very much DNA in any of them and they were able to pull it together.

Actually, my husband, who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence.

Yeah, it was cool.

That's really cool.

But then they, the Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that they had no idea was going to belong to a totally new species of human, right?

Yeah.

And they were able to get a really high coverage whole genome out of this tiny little finger bone that totally rewrote what we thought we knew about evolutionary history.

And that's pretty recently, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Within the last decade.