Matthias Meyer has just published the results of what may be the world’s most wasteful genome-sequencing project. In decoding just 0.1% of the genome of the oldest DNA ever recovered from an ancient human, the molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, threw out enough raw data to map the modern human genome dozens of times over.
Image: The Sima de los Huesos hominins lived approximately 400,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene. Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
