Ethical Issues In Genetic Analysis

Previously history was determined by what we could piece together with whatever information we could gather from looking at ancient pottery and fossils. Nowadays, new technology brings us a wealth of information that assists us in a wide variety of things ranging from determining the lifestyle and diet of our ancestors to where and when they migrated with relatively accurate precision. Some of these advancements are simple in concept and serve a single purpose, such as sonar, while others come from fields of science that are highly complex and rapidly evolving, such as genetics and more specifically the analysis of DNA.

Over the past nineteen thousand years, sea levels have risen up by a little over one hundred meters. While there may have

What this means is that scientists are now able to take bones and teeth to learn new things about our ancestors, such as genetic diversity, migration, and their diet. The most important part of genetics in archaeology is DNA sequencing. How it works is that DNA is first taken from naturally preserved skeletons. Then, the DNA is bound with RNA probes based on our own DNA. If the probes bind with the DNA successfully, then that means that the DNA is uncontaminated by microorganisms, and is ready to be isolated. Lastly begins the actual process of sequencing and analysing the DNA. The process itself is extremely complex and goes beyond the scope of what I am trying to tell, but the end result is that the process can tell us the order of the four molecules, or nucleobases, in a strand of DNA. As said before, this end result can tell us things such as migration. For an example, a study from two years ago showed that the North American Arctic had a migration wave separate from the one that linked to Native Americans roughly six thousand years ago. This group of people came to be known as the Paleo-Eskimos. These people lived in near isolation, however roughly seven hundred years ago, their genetic continuity was cut off by a new wave of people, known as the Inuits, who seemed to have completely replaced

It’s a field that was first established by the chemist Willard Libby, who after working on the first atomic bomb, published his set of the first radiocarbon dates. His technique is extremely important in dating archaeological finds as, given that there is organic material present in the item or substance being examined, it can be accurate up to fifty thousand years ago. The science behind radiocarbon dating is, as the name suggest, based upon the radioactivity of the Carbon-14 isotope found in any and all organisms. Beyond being present in all organisms, what really makes Carbon-14 useful is its half life. The isotope decays at a regular rate, with said rate being fifty percent every five thousand and seven hundred thirty years. So say if there was an organic object found to have twenty five percent Carbon-14 left, then it would be estimated to be eleven thousand and four hundred years old. There is more to this process as the dates must be calibrated to adjust for things that artificially add in Carbon-14 such as nuclear explosions, but like the part on genetics, that is outside the scope of what I am trying to tell. To finish off with an example of how carbon dating can be applied to a real world scenario, the process has shown that bones from Mladec in Central Europe are about thirty one thousand years old, making them the oldest bones that, when coupled along with other findings in Mladec, show the site to