A bone found on the banks of a Siberian river has yielded the oldest modern human genome yet recovered.
It belonged to a man who lived 45,000 years ago. On this River to River segment, host Ben Kieffer talks about its significance with anthropologists Robert Franciscus and Drew Kitchen of the University of Iowa.
"It is not only the earliest dated bone outside of Africa and Western Asia," says Franciscus, "but it also comes complete with this great amount of genomic information that tells us a lot, not only about this individual, but about the populations this individual might have derived from, and about the relationships between that population and the other populations alive at that time and earlier."
