EDITORIAL 28 March 2018
On the use and abuse of ancient DNA
Researchers in several disciplines need to tread carefully over shared landscapes of the past.
History might, as historian Arnold Toynbee allegedly said, be one damned thing after another, but historians and archaeologists spend a lot of their time trying to put those things into the right order. Assistance from science over the decades has been transformative, but not without difficulty: it took years for some archaeologists to be won over by radiocarbon dating.
Now, historians and archaeologists are grappling with a new scientific technique. As we discuss in a News Feature, the genetic study of ancient DNA is exploding, and the findings are posing several problems. One is a need for geneticists, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to understand exactly how their skills and insights complement each other’s. It is clear, for example, that although genetics has useful things to say about the sweep of population history, the more conventional disciplines provide essential context.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03857-3
