Scientists are getting surprisingly good at extracting ancient human DNA from simple dirt and dust, even when no physical remains remain… No bones, no teeth, no fossils. A small spoonful of sediment from a cave in Spain has offered ancient DNA from several individuals who lived approximately 22,000 years ago. There are no human remains in this layer of the El Mirón Cave, but that has not stopped scientists. The sediment taken from El Mirón Cave weighed no more than a few grains of rice and had to be sequenced 100 times to obtain enough usable data. The team had to examine more than a billion DNA fragments in the sample to find any human traces. In addition, modern pollution also had to be taken into account. The findings of the study, led by researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria, are published in Science Advances. Europe’s last ice age. Skeletons from this period are extremely rare. In fact, only a few human remains from this time and culture have been found, and two are of very poor quality. This new research at El Mirón adds crucial genetic information to the picture. This ancient human DNA suggests that the people who once inhabited this cave likely belonged to a group of Western ancestry with dark skin, hair, and eyes. The DNA appears to have come from a mix of individuals, including more men than women. “This result highlights the ability of sedaDNA (sedimentary DNA) to uncover genetic dynamics previously inaccessible in the absence of human remains,” the authors conclude, “and decisively connects archaeological records to human genetic identities.” El Mirón Cave. (Press Office of the Government of Cantabria/CC BY 3.0) As you can imagine, SedaDNA is on its way to revolutionizing the field of archaeology. Without the need for physical human remains, experts may no longer be limited by a fossil record in the same way. The challenges of this technology still need to be resolved, but with work, a 2025 review argues that silkDNA could lead to a much deeper understanding of human, hunter-gatherer dispersal dynamics. interactions, early agriculture, domestication and diseases. “This takes archeology to a whole new level of processual research in some of the most interesting areas of modern archaeology, including mobility, diet, and family histories,” the review argued. “The application of silkDNA to a wide variety of archaeological sites and questions will increase rapidly in the coming years,” the authors predicted. Already, the results are starting to arrive. In 2021, for example, researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA from the mud floor of a cave in Georgia. The genetic information belonged to a woman who lived 25,000 years ago. Just this year, another sample of ancient human DNA was found preserved in the wall of a cave in Argentina decorated with rock art. “Although we cannot directly connect the traces of ancient human DNA we have found with the creation of rock art,” explained Alba Bossoms Mesa, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute. “This is the first evidence of human DNA being preserved on cave walls in thousands of years.” It is not found in El Mirón either. In 2025, researchers discovered animal and human mitochondrial DNA in soil samples dating between 46,000 and 21,000 years ago. Animals and humans seem to have inhabited the cave at different times. This new research goes even further and extracts nuclear DNA from the cave sediment. Mitochondrial DNA is only passed down through maternal lines, but nuclear DNA comes from both parents and contains more information about an individual’s life. lineage. This data can help scientists better understand whether or not Europe’s western and eastern populations during the last ice age mixed, or whether they stayed in their respective corners of the continent. Where the new DNA samples from the Ice Age in southwestern Europe come from. (Gelabert et al., Science Advances, 2026) To learn more about human migration at this time, lead author Pere Gelabert and his colleagues compared nuclear DNA found at El Mirón with the remains of an ancient woman in France, who lived about 31,000 years ago, and a tooth from northern Spain dating back to about 25,000 years ago. Both individuals appear to have had some eastern ancestry, suggesting that human populations at both ends of Europe were admixed before the Last Glacial Maximum. But maybe that mix didn’t last. Human DNA from the El Mirón cave, which is approximately 22,000 years old, only shows signs of Western ancestry. “Most importantly,” the authors conclude, “…our genomic data argue against major population replacement or discontinuity at this time.” continuous. The samples of ancient human DNA that scientists from this time and place are working with are still scarce, but silkDNA techniques have already contributed greatly, virtually doubling the available evidence. “Future work integrating additional skeletal genomes and silkDNA data sets will be essential to further resolve the processes that shaped the genetic landscape of Upper Paleolithic populations in Europe,” Gelabert and colleagues conclude. Our ancestors may have passed from ashes to dust, but after all, they are still here with us. The research has been published in Science Advances. This article was fact-checked by Rachel Garner and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we take pride in our process, we are human. 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