The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology | deoxyribonucleic acid
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) [Ge]. Genes, the organizers of inheritance, are composed of DNA, thread-like molecules which carry the hereditary instructions needed to build an organism and make it work. Genes are copied or replicated with every new generation of living cells and thus preserve the blueprint for that form of life. For archaeology this opens up tremendous potential to address problems that could hardly be contemplated in the 1970s. What have been called studies of ‘the archaeology of the human body’ allow populations to be explored in terms the sex, hair colour, skin type, blood group, and family connections of individuals from whom DNA can be recovered. Major issues about patterns of colonization and relationships between human populations can also potentially be explored, although issues relating to early hominid development are way beyond the range of preserved DNA which so far has been recovered from preserved remains back to about 40 000...
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