Can This Supercomputer Crack The Mystery Of Humans Origins And The Ghost Population Of Europe? 5 December, 2014 At the University of Texas at Austin, there is a supercomputer that scientists are now using trying to solve the greatest mystery of all - the true origin of the human species. This very fast computer capable of 9.6 quadrillion operations per second has now solved a problem in genetics, by looking at the bones of a young boy who died 24,000 years ago and was found near Malta, Siberia. Existing genetic models have suggested that modern Europeans share DNA with 3 different groups: blue-eyed, swarthy hunter-gatherers who arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago; a second group of light-skinned, brown-eyed farmers from the Near East who migrated about 7,000 years ago; and a third mystery group who arrived more recently to share their genes. But no one knew who this ghost population was. By using the supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin, David Reich of Harvard and his team were able to confirm a theory that the boys group of North Eurasians were indeed the missing population. Some may ask: How do you go from a 24,000-year-old bone to a supercomputer-ready data set so large that it would take a week to download? The first step requires drilling a hole in the ancient bone, and hoping that the powder holds enough viable ancient DNA to analyze. DNA degrades quickly in hot and wet conditions, and its no accident that the ancient DNA samples in the study came from cold-weather locations in Germany, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Siberia, Popular Science reports. We have all these really cool samples from Loschbour (Luxembourg), and the Stuttgart cave in Germany, and the Malta, they have a high percentage of DNA from the individual who died, says Schraiber. You test bones until you find one that has a lot of endogenous DNA, and when you find one of those, you have a beer, because youre happy. You do get lucky sometimes. In spite of all the computing firepower and sophisticated population divergence modeling, the teams eureka moment of nailing down the third ancestral population required a stroke of luck as well. Malta boy: Geneticist Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida called the findings jaw-dropping. DNA from this ancient Siberian skeleton offers clues to the first Americans. Picture: The State Hermitage museum, St. Petersburg As they were working, says Schraiber, Reich and his Harvard colleague Iosif Lazaridis used a tentative model of the ghost population that included DNA sequences that looked very similar to those of some Native Americans. David and Iosif noticed that things fit better mathematically if something close to the Native American genome was one of the ancestral populations of modern Europeans. 400,000-Year-Old Skeleton With Alien DNA Baffles Scientists Can a supercomputer solve the mystery of our mysterious origins? Around the same time, in November 2013, a team led by scientists in Copenhagen published a paper about the genome of the Malta boy, and concluded that he shared DNA heritage with Native Americans. Alien Message Can Be Hidden In Your DNA Do We All Carry A Cosmic Greeting Card? Once the Malta boy DNA was in the model, the team had the match, with results published in Nature in September. Modern Europeans shared at least some DNA with this group of Northern Eurasians, themselves closely related to ancestral Native Americans, who migrated across the frozen land bridge to the Americas about 15,000 years ago. The ancient North Eurasians were not only ancestors of modern Native Americans but provided up to 20 percent of the DNA in modern Europeans as well. Additional studies are afoot to figure out how and when the ghost population migrated to Europe, and possible answers are expected next year. The powerful combination of state-of-the-art DNA extraction, high-throughput sequencing machines, and abundant supercomputing power is creating a vast trove of data about human descent. Its also making possible discoveries about the distant past once thought out of our reach.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:42:42 +0000
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