The burials of two boys—each found decades ago and thousands of miles apart, but recently subjected to genetic analysis—are helping settle the matter of where the first residents of the Americas came from.

A lab at the University of Copenhagen, led by geneticist Eske Willerslev, has sequenced the genome of a four-year-old boy whose remains were found near the Siberian village of Mal’ta in the 1920s. Dating back 24,000 years, the boy’s DNA was found to be closely related to that of modern Native Americans, suggesting that some of the Mal’ta people’s descendants migrated to the New World. Researchers were surprised that he was significantly related to Europeans, as well as South and Central Asians, but not to East Asians, who have long been known to be connected to Native Americans. The scientists believe that today’s Native Americans are a mixture of the Mal’ta and East Asians they encountered en route from Siberia to the Americas. “The genetics tell us about homelands,” says Mike Waters, a Texas A&M University archaeologist involved in the research, “but it doesn’t tell us about routes.”

Across the Bering Strait, the remains of a one- to two-year-old boy, called Anzick boy, discovered in western Montana more than 45 years ago, are the oldest known burial in the United States, dating to 12,500 years ago. The same Danish lab studied his genome and found that he is a direct ancestor of all modern Native American populations from Mexico to Chile. The boy is also closely, but less directly, related to tribes in Canada and the Arctic. However, because of distrust between the U.S. Native American community and scientists, not enough DNA of American tribes is available to determine their relation to the boy. Waters predicts that “a large chunk of Native Americans in the U.S. will show a strong direct ancestry to the Anzick boy.”

Willerslev says that sequencing more ancient genomes from around the Americas might eventually uncover more detailed migration patterns. “We all have years of work ahead of us if we would like to understand the full picture of the early peopling of the Americas,” he says.

The woman, dead at 30, was buried 1,900 years ago in an oak log near Juellinge, Denmark. Interred with her was a long-handled bronze strainer that still held residue of a fermented drink she may have been meant to enjoy in the afterlife.

Now the ingredients and even the flavor of that drink, a “grog” made from local fruits, grains, and herbs mixed with grape wine from southern Europe, are becoming clearer. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern has applied biomolecular techniques to organic residue taken from four ancient Scandinavian artifacts, including the woman’s strainer, a clay jar, and pieces of Roman bronze drinking sets, dating to between 1500 B.C. and A.D. 200.

Using a method called solid phase micro-extraction, McGovern found volatile organic compounds that are biomarkers for ingredients such as lingonberry, bog cranberry, rye, barley, juniper, birch, pine, bog myrtle, and yarrow. Tandem mass spectrometry then showed the presence of tartaric acid, the biomarker for wine.

“This work is the first to prove that wine was being traded from the south to the north at this time,” says McGovern. It has also created a detailed, consistent picture of ancient Scandinavia’s preferred beverage of distinction. McGovern is working with Delaware’s Dogfish Head Brewery—as he has on previous concoctions based on ancient residues—to create a modern rendition of the sour, fruity, herbaceous grog.

Just like the bones of living people with osteoporosis, human remains in the archaeological record can lose bone mass over time. These samples usually require treatment with plastic fillers before they can be moved and studied. 

A team of chemists at the University of Florence has devised a novel alternative that uses a chemical reaction to return lost minerals, such as calcium, to fragile old bones. The scientists treated fragments of degraded bone dating from A.D. 1000–1400 with a solution of calcium hydroxide nanoparticles in alcohol. Over several days, the nanoparticles reacted with airborne carbon dioxide and traces of collagen in the bone to form needlelike crystals of aragonite, a hard variant of calcium carbonate that forms naturally in seashells and corals. The crystals left the bones—in this case a saint’s relics from the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome—smoother, whiter, and much stronger.

The method, says study coauthor Luigi Dei, requires further investigation. Unlike the use of plastic fillers to shore up bone, this process is likely irreversible. Once perfected, however, it could be of use wherever archaeologists encounter brittle bones.