Australian research: 7200-year-old DNA remains of teenage girl reveal fascinating details

A team of archaeologists and researchers have recovered DNA from the remains of a hunter-gatherer woman. The teenager had died 7200 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The analysis of the fossil revealed that it belonged to a girl aged 17 or 18. It is believed to be the first time that ancient human DNA has been discovered in Wallacea, a group of islands between mainland Asia and Australia.

DNA of a teenage girl who died 7,200 years ago

The study conducted by researchers and archaeologists has been published in the journal, Nature. The remains of the woman, nicknamed Besse, were excavated in 2015 from a cave named Leang Panninge. The researchers estimated that Besse was about 17-18 years old at the time of her death. According to the study, the analysis shows that this ancient individual was a distant relative of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans.

The findings show that about half of her genetic makeup is with present-day Indigenous Australians, and people in New Guinea and the Western Pacific islands. In addition, DNA was inherited from the now-extinct Denisovans, distant cousins of Neanderthals, whose fossils have only been found in Siberia and Tibet. Ancient DNA from Besse's inner ear bone supports previous claims that Toalean foragers were connected to the earliest modern humans to invade Wallacea about 65,000 years ago, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans.

The researchers have suggested that she may have belonged to the Toalean people, who are thought to have lived in Sulawesi at the time. Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution informed that it is the first complete skeleton that has been found alongside "securely dated artefacts of the Toalean culture". In the statement published on the University website, Professor Brumm added that Toaleans were early hunter-gatherers who lived in seclusion. 

"The Toaleans were early hunter-gatherers who lived a secluded existence in the forests of South Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until 1,500 years ago, hunting wild pigs and collecting edible shellfish from rivers," said Professor Brumm in the statement.  

IMAGE: Pixabay/RepresentativeImage