Meet Inuk, a 4,000-year-old man known from a tuft of hair found in Greenland permafrost.

In those frozen strands, enough DNA was preserved to sequence the first ancient-human genome and confirm an unexpected ancient migration from Siberia to the New World, plus a few of Inuk's own traits.

Along with brown eyes, brown skin and facial hair, he had "a tendency to baldness," said Eske Willerslev, a Niels Bohr Institute evolutionary geneticist who led the analysis, published Monday in Nature. "But because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume that he died young."

The remains of Inuk — which translates to "person" or "human being" in the Inuit language family — were found in Qeqertasussuk, an archaeological site in southwest Greenland.

A few bone fragments and hair tufts found at the site are the only biological remnants of the Saqqaq, the earliest known inhabitants of the North American Arctic.

Controversy exists over the Saqqaq's origins. Some anthropologists think they were descended from temperate North Americans who wandered north, or from early ancestors of modern Inuit who left no archaeological trace.

But the analysis that revealed Inuk's eye color and impending baldness also returned genetic patterns most closely related to those now found in indigenous inhabitants of eastern Siberia. The Saqqaq appear to have originated there.

The findings support the implications of a mitochondrial DNA analysis of the hair published by Willerslev's team in Science in 2008. That study also showed patterns of Siberian origin, and a clear biological break between the Dorset culture (the next-oldest Paleo-Eskimo group) and the ancestors of modern Inuit people.

Whether the Saqqaq influenced their cultures is not known, said Willerslev.

Inuk's genome is the oldest yet reconstructed by scientists. It may be difficult to perform such decipherings on remains found in warmer climes, which degrade faster. But that remains to be tested.

"Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like," wrote Griffith University molecular biologists David Lambert and Leon Huynen in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

*Images

Left: Electron microscope image of the hair/*Nature Right: Artist's rendering of Inuk/Nuka Godfredsen

See Also:

Citations

"Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo." By Morten Rasmussen, Yingrui Li, Stinus Lindgreen, Jakob Skou Pedersen, Anders Albrechtsen, Ida Moltke, Mait Metspalu, Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Ramneek Gupta, Marcelo Bertalan, Kasper Nielsen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Yong Wang, Maanasa Raghavan, Paula F. Campos, Hanne Munkholm Kamp, Andrew S. Wilson, Andrew Gledhill, Silvana Tridico, Michael Bunce, Eline D. Lorenzen, Jonas Binladen, Xiaosen Guo, Jing Zhao, Xiuqing Zhang, Hao Zhang, Zhuo Li, Minfeng Chen, Ludovic Orlando, Karsten Kristiansen, Mads Bak, Niels Tommerup, Christian Bendixen, Tracey L. Pierre, Bjarne Grønnow, Morten Meldgaard, Claus Andreasen, Sardana A. Fedorova, Ludmila P. Osipova, Thomas F. G. Higham, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Thomas v. O. Hansen, Finn C. Nielsen, Michael H. Crawford, Søren Brunak, Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten, Richard Villems, Rasmus Nielsen, Anders Krogh, Jun Wang and Eske Willerslev. Nature*, Vol. 463 No. 7282, Feb. 11, 2010.*

"Face of the past reconstructed." By David M. Lambert and Leon Huynen. Nature*, Vol. 463 No. 7282, Feb. 11, 2010.*

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.