Teeth Tell Tales

We’ve all experienced the unusual sensation of wiggling out our wobbly baby teeth. So too would the two owners of these milk teeth, who lost them in a remote region of north eastern Siberia 31,000 years ago. Their discovery reveals the existence of a previously unknown group of people who lived there during the last Ice Age, surviving the harsh climate by keeping on the move and hunting big woolly beasts like mammoths and bison. DNA analysis of their remains show that these people are closely related to Native Americans and are likely to be the missing link connecting ancient Siberians to the first people to arrive in the Americas across what is now the Bering Strait. But although these milk teeth reveal fascinating new details about the journeys our human ancestors made around the world, they still can’t tell us whether the Tooth Fairy ever came to claim them.

Today marks the start of Festival of Archaeology week in the UK

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Research from the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen; Russian Academy of Science; Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK
• Image copyright held by the photographer
• Research published in Nature, June 2019