4,000 years old and recreated from single tuft of hair: meet Inuk

HE WAS prone to baldness, earwax and shovel-shaped front teeth, and was genetically adapted to be able to cope with cold temperatures.

He lived 4,000 years ago, and scientists have created this accurate image of him after mapping his genome from a tuft of hair discovered buried in the snow in Greenland.

It is the first time the genome from an extinct human has been reconstructed in detail.

The Danish team behind the work have nicknamed the ancient human "Inuk", which means "human" in Greenlandic.

The tuft of hair was found during an excavation in north-west Greenland in the 1980s and has been stored at the National Museum in Denmark.

Professor Eske Willerslev, from the University of Copenhagen, heard about it and got permission to analyse it for DNA.

He said: "For several months, we were uncertain as to whether our efforts would be fruitful. However, through the hard work of a large, international team, we finally managed to sequence the first complete genome of an extinct human."

Inuk can now be used as a blueprint by scientists to give a description of how prehistoric Greenlanders would have looked.

As well as having a tendency to baldness, dry earwax, brown eyes and dark skin, he would have had blood type A+ and was genetically adapted to cold temperatures.

The scientists will also be able to find out to what extent the man was predisposed to certain illnesses.

Mapping the genome has enabled the team to work out that the man's ancestors crossed to Greenland from north-eastern Siberia between 4,400 and 6,400 years ago, in a migration wave that was independent of his Native American and Inuit ancestors.

Morten Rasmussen, a PhD student who was involved in the research, emphasised that it was not going to lead to a "Frankenstein's Monster". He said: "It's more like we've got the blueprints for a house, but we don't know how to build it."

However, he said compiling the human genome would enable scientists to examine genes to try to identify traits such as "why Scandinavians are blonde, why some are predisposed to certain illnesses and why others more easily become addicted to alcohol or tobacco".

Prof Willerslev, who was previously involved in mapping the woolly mammoth genome, added that their findings could help archaeologists to find out what had happened to people from extinct cultures.

"Doing so requires organic material – bones or hair kept as museum pieces or found at archaeological sites," he said.

"Previously, the DNA needed to have been frozen or buried in a layer of permafrost. But with the new methods developed here at the centre, that is not a premise any more."

The research is published in the journal Nature.