Scientists have identified the physical characteristics of a man who lived 4,000 year ago using nothing more than a few strands of his hair.
They extracted DNA and built a near complete copy of his genome, the first time this has been done with ancient human remains.
They also managed to put together a family tree for the man, who the research team named "Inuk". In the process they learned of a previously unknown wave of immigrants to the New World, a migration that had nothing to do with the colonisations that later led to the Amerindian and Inuit populations in North and Central America.
Details of the research led by scientists from Denmark were released this evening by the journal Nature. All the discoveries were based on a detailed analysis of a few tufts of human hair dug out of the permafrost at Qeqertasussuk in western Greenland.
The freezing conditions helped to preserve Inuk's DNA and the scientists were able to recover it and then compare it with genetic sequences from other human populations.
The "sequencing project described here is a direct test of the extent to which ancient genomics can contribute knowledge about now-extinct cultures, from which little is known about their ...traits, genetic origin and biological relationship to present-day populations", the authors write.
It is a test the scientists passed with flying colours it seems.
They discovered the man had type A positive blood and non-white skin. He had thick dark hair but was also likely to go bald at a young age. He had shovel-shaped front teeth which he used to feast on seal meat-details which once again were read from the DNA recovered from a few strands of hair.
The research team was also able to prove that the man was a descendant of a human migration that originally left northeast Asia and travelled into the North American Arctic to settle there perhaps 5,500 years ago.
Inuk was likely a member of the Saqqaq culture, one of a number of groups known to have occupied the Arctic on both sides of the Bering Strait that separates Russia and Alaska.
The Saqqaq were the earliest culture known to have settled in Greenland.
The assumption was that the Saqqaq were related to Native American and Inuit populations, but there was little proof given samples of human remains from these ancient populations are so scarce.
In fact Inuk's people are likely descendants of people living along northeast Asia. His DNA proves that he is not closely related to Native Americans or Inuit, which means his people represented a previously unknown movement of people out of Asia.
The research demonstrates that "we have an increasingly powerful forensic tool with which to reconstruct extinct humans", states an associated article in Nature. "This will also allow high-resolution analyses of worldwide population movements on a scale not previously seen", it adds.
