Narrator: Deep in the basement of Denmark's
National Museum, a Stone Age treasure lies hidden.
Twenty-five years ago, it was locked
away and forgotten.
At the time, scientists had no idea that this
seemingly ordinary object could have the power to
rewrite history.
In their hands was the raw material to
reconstruct the identity of a 4,000-year-old human
a feat scientists thought impossible until now.
From these tiny blocks of DNA a human face begins
to appear that threatens our long-held theory of
how humans first entered the New World.
The greatest scientific revelations often come
from the most unlikely places.
This desolate slab of ice, called Greenland,
was one of the last frontiers to be
inhabited by humans.
The last place, you might think, to try and solve
the huge question of how people migrated
around the Earth.
But one scientist thinks he may find the answer
buried in the story of the first pioneers to
enter this Arctic wilderness.
Eske Willerslev: It's super fascinating to
imagine what made people go into go into what really,
at least today, consider a very hostile environment.
But for the first people entering this area, I
mean this is true exploration, right?
Narrator: Around 4,500 years ago, the first
settlers arrived in this icy world with nothing
more than Stone Age tools.
Every day their survival was at the
mercy of the elements.
Nobody knows who they were, where they came
from, or why, after 1,500 years, they vanished.
Dr. Eske Willerslev is obsessed with finally
exposing the origin of the first explorers to
reach Greenland.
He is here hunting for human DNA.
These Stone Age people, known as the Saqqaq, left
so few traces; their very existence had
been cast in doubt.
Eske Willerslev: Is this skin, is this hair on it
or is it just...
Narrator: Until now, all that's been found are
fragments of their harpoons,
knives and clothing.
But Eske is convinced that if he can get his
hands on the genetic code of Greenland's first
settlers, it might complete the entire
puzzle of how humans first entered
the new world.
Eske Willerslev: A human bone?
That's pretty amazing, actually.
There exists, I think, it's like three bone
fragments of the Saqqaq and that's basically it.
All over the Arctic, right?
So, it's a mystery what happened to the dead
people from that culture.
Narrator: For years, scientists have thought
that the New World was settled by only a few
explosive waves of migration.
During the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago,
the first inhabitants came across the Bering
Strait land bridge, and populated the continent.
But Eske's hunch is that there is more to the
story there may have been others staking a claim to
this virgin land.
At last, he thinks he's got the
tools to prove it.
Eske Willerslev: So hopefully this core will
contain, you know, DNA from the
Saqqaq people themselves.
We hope that they have been urinating here, too
because this is the DNA from those cells that we
are actually looking for.
Being a molecular biologist, it's an
incredible time.
What we're doing here, fishing in the dirt, you
know, for human DNA, and if you go back five,
six years I wouldn't imagine that that
would be possible.
This development in genetics will really
change how we look at human evolution and human
migration, human spread across the world.
Narrator: But after years combing the Arctic, Eske
had hit a dead end.
Of the few bones he'd found, none contain a
viable sample of DNA.
Then, where he least expects it, Eske hits the
genetic jackpot.
All that time, the elusive DNA he needed was
just around the corner from his
office in Copenhagen.
Eske Willerslev: I spent years traveling around to
the most remote places in Greenland searching for
human remains and, without any luck,
spending fortunes and freezing my butt off and
then I found out what I was looking for was
indeed lying in the basement of the National
Museum in Copenhagen.
Narrator: The prized sample Eske had been
seeking had been gathering dust in the
museum's archives for over two decades.
On an expedition to Disko Bay in 1986, an
archaeology team came across an unusual find
buried in Greenland's permafrost.
By a stroke of luck, a one-of-a-kind genetic
sample had become encased in the frozen soil where
it lay for over 4,000 years.
At the time, this matted tuft of hair
was merely a curiosity.
DNA research was just getting off the ground.
But to Eske's eyes, 25 years later, it's a
potential gold mine.
Eske Willerslev: Incredible actually,
incredible finding.
First, I thought, "Why didn't they tell me so I
could have avoided, you know, freezing my butt
off here in Greenland for all those years?"
But quickly this feeling was replaced by just
excitement that we were standing with
something super unique.
And I just knew it was very likely that this
sample would work for DNA because of
the really good quality.
Narrator: With this 4,000-year-old clump of
hair, Eske and his team of genetic whizzes set
out to make history: to be the first to
reconstruct the entire genetic makeup, or
genome, of an ancient human.
Eske Willerslev: What you're actually doing
here is you're building a human, right?
Like you're building a house of bricks, you're
actually building, you know, you're recreating
an ancient human the same way.
Narrator: So how do you resurrect a
4,000-year-old human from a few strands of hair?
In their genetic test kitchen at Copenhagen
University, Eske's team cooks up recipes for
extracting ancient DNA.
Ancient DNA is highly contaminated from
bacteria in the soil and from contact with modern
humans.
So, they give the hair a good washing
in a bath of bleach.
Then, they add a dash of enzymes, which break down
the cellular structure of the hair.
Next, they shake it up and put it
in the oven to bake.
The heat activates the enzymes,
which liquefies the hair.
Now that they have a pure, concentrated
sample, all their prep work boils down
to a final test.
If they succeed in drawing out the DNA, it
will be a breakthrough in the world of genetics.
They inject drops of the sample into a tray of gel
and zap it with an electric current, putting
the DNA on the move.
The gel acts like a strainer the longer
strands of modern DNA, seen in blue, get stuck,
while the shorter fragments of ancient DNA,
in yellow, are small enough to pass through.
Eske Willerslev: The electric charge is really
drawing the DNA through the gel.
So we can actually see how the DNA is moving
through the gel.
Narrator: But the yellow cubes could
be fool's gold.
Eske won't know if it's really ancient
DNA until they shine an ultraviolet light on it.
Eske Willerslev: It's the first moment of truth,
because if you get a negative result, it means
that you haven't been able to amplify anything,
then we just have to start all over again.
Narrator: Laced in the gel, is a toxic chemical
called ethidium bromide, which binds to the DNA
and makes it glow pink under UV light.
Eske Willerslev: The DNA is kind of flashing, so
you can actually see, you know, the DNA itself
inside the gel here.
And it actually looks quite promising; it's
very, very short pieces of DNA.
That's usually a very good sign for,
for ancient DNA.
Narrator: After sweating it out in their kitchen
for weeks, they see that their recipe
was a huge success.
DNA is usually invisible to scientists, but here,
they can actually cut it out,
like cubes of Jell-o.
With these tiny blocks, they'll begin to re-build
their ancient human.
Eske Willerslev: It will be a major breakthrough.
No one has, has done that for an
ancient human before.
And obviously we are also very excited about what
the DNA will be able to tell us about this
person, from where the person came, you know,
potentially what the person looked like.
So, I mean, it's all very exciting.
Narrator: But to pull it off,
they'll need massive amounts of computing power.
Over the next several months, banks of
high-powered sequencing machines will sift
through the billions of genetic details packed
inside the samples.
An eternity for Eske and his team, who are now so
close to finding out the identity of
their Stone Age human.
The Stone Age conjures up images of
a primitive way of life.
Yet what we do know from the tools the Saqqaq left
behind is that they were extremely precise.
Morten Meldgaard: They were exquisite hunters.
When they came here, they came with a perfect tool
kit, the harpoons, the lances,
the bows and arrows.
And they were beautiful in their
technological refinement.
The challenges that they met here were greater
than what you have met when you were a
Stone Age hunter in northern Europe.
Narrator: The Saqqaq lived on the
margins of survival.
Almost all of Greenland is encased in a sheet of
ice, thousands of feet thick.
The sun doesn't appear for three
months of the year.
Temperatures plummet to 50 degrees below zero.
It is a lifeless island, except
on the very fringes.
The first evidence of the Saqqaq surfaces around
2500 BCE, about the time the Great Pyramids
were being built.
Their Stone Age culture thrived along these
western shores for about 1,500 years,
and then vanished.
But beyond this snapshot, there are gaping holes in
the story of these first Arctic hunters.
Holes that Eske's betting his ancient DNA can fill.
Reconstructing this Stone Age human, could finally
solve the riddle of who the Saqqaq were
and how they got here.
Finally, Eske gets his hands on
the sequencing data.
In front of him is a puzzle with billions of
pieces they will have to fit together.
The good news is it that almost all the material
is there to tease out the genetic traits
of their ancient human.
As they pick through the fragments, the first
piece of the puzzle quickly falls into place.
Eske Willerslev: One of the first things we
actually found out was that we are talking about
a male individual here and we could see that
because we started getting Y chromosome
sequences coming up and that's the only thing you
find in males.
If it had been a female, you would only have got X
chromosomes coming up.
Narrator: Eske and his team give their Stone Age
man an identity.
They name him Inuk, which means
"human" in Greenlandic.
Eske Willerslev: Already with this information you
start wondering, what exactly did this male
individual look like, right?
I mean, what kind of eye color, skin color, what
kind of stature, what kind of adaptations did
he have to living in this very harsh environment?
Narrator: Like code breakers in World War II,
the team will have to scan through the reams of
data, picking up on patterns that correspond
to unique genetic traits.
As they make one discovery after the next,
they could hit upon the answer to a far more
haunting question: Why the
Saqqaq culture disappeared?
Narrator: All life boils down to just four letters
A, T, C and G.
This is the alphabet of DNA.
It sounds simple, but these letters, or bases,
come in billions of combinations giving each
of us a unique genetic code.
Eske Willerslev: It's really the particular
order of these four different bases that
makes me different from anybody else.
I mean, I have an identical twin brother,
so we have exactly the same sequences, but
besides that, I would be different from any other
person in the world.
Narrator: While his team dives into Inuk's genetic
matrix, Eske goes after the bigger picture.
He is back on the hunt for more DNA.
To figure out why Inuk's people disappeared, he
needs more human remains from the Saqqaq and the
people who came after.
So he heads back to Disko Bay, not far from where
Inuk's hair was discovered.
His hunting ground is the Stone Age settlement
known as Qajaa a coastal oasis surrounded by ice
flows streaming from Greenland's interior.
Along the shoreline, Eske and
colleague Morten Meldgaard encounter a
wall of bones.
Morten Meldgaard: It represents the leftovers
of thousands of meals.
Most of them are seal bones.
When you look at the amount of remains of animals,
and so on, it's just incredible what they were
hunting at that time.
Eske Willerslev: It's basically similar to kind
of a polar bear, right?
In food choice, a lot of meat,
a lot of marine meat.
Narrator: What they didn't have were
a lot of vegetables.
The Saqqaq would have relished the liver eaten
fresh from the seals, which is
rich in vitamins.
Here, the churning of icebergs along the seabed
dredges up nutrients that feed an
abundance of marine life.
Inuk probably hunted along these shores.
Perhaps even some of these bones are leftovers
from his kills.
But out of all the bones found here, what's
strange is that none of them are human.
Eske Willerslev: We find so little human material
and we find so much of the animals
they were eating.
It's a mystery, I mean, why there's so little
remains from them.
Narrator: Across all of Greenland, no Saqqaq
grave or burial site has ever been found.
Some speculate they placed their dead on
icebergs and their bodies were carried out to sea.
But if there are any buried bones, Eske is
betting they'd be somewhere near this
coastal depot.
Many ancient people buried their dead where
they had a view of the sea.
So he and his team scour the headlands above the
site, looking for ancient DNA.
Among the rocks overlooking the fjord,
their luck appears to turn.
Eske Willerslev: Have you found something?
Amazing.
Narrator: From the looks of it, they suspect this
could be a grave of the Dorset people: the next
culture to show up in Greenland about the time
the Saqqaq disappeared.
Eske Willerslev: It could potentially be Dorset,
because of the grave setting, so, uh, exactly
the type of material that potentially could solve,
you know, the question of where the Dorset came.
What would be really interesting to explore is
if these are actually the descendants of Inuk's
people or is it another people moving in and that
Inuk's people are dying out and we basically
don't know that.
Narrator: Figuring out if the Saqqaq became the
Dorset people, or if they are completely separate
groups, is key to understanding how this
Arctic wilderness was settled.
If Eske can nail it, it could change our whole
perspective of how humans migrated into
the new world.
Narrator: The skull could be the missing
link Eske's been searching for.
But on his quest to find more DNA,
he's leaving nothing to chance.
Luckily, there are other places to look,
besides just human bones.
Eske is trying to dig down to the Dorset layer
in hopes of striking a vein of DNA.
But even with a hair dryer, they can only thaw
out a couple inches a day.
Eske Willerslev: We have to go that far, further,
and then we should be there.
The idea is to use a drilling machine to take
permafrost cores, frozen cores from the culture
layer of the Dorset.
If they have, you know, crapped or urinated here
in this area, there will come DNA out with that.
Narrator: In the hole next door, archaeologists
are exposing a frozen timeline of over 4,000
years of Greenland's history.
Encased In these layers are clues to what
happened to Inuk's people.
Morten Meldgaard: In the top layer here, the Thule
culture, which is from where the present day
Greenlanders, they descend.
And then we have a thin horizon with Dorset
culture, and then moving down here, we have the
Saqqaq culture, which you see all the sticks and
the wood that was the period of Inuk.
Narrator: These three hunting societies shared
many similarities, but the differences in their
tools make scientists question if
they are all related.
Morten Meldgaard: This harpoon that I'm holding
here is a typical Saqqaq harpoon.
You can see all the small details; there's nothing
extravagant; it's just what's necessary
to get the animal.
In the end of the harpoon, you would have a
small blade here made of stone so it would be
shot, goes right into the seal.
And it gives you an impression of
a perfect hunter.
Narrator: In contrast to the Saqqaq's highly
practical society, the Dorset appear to be a
much more spiritual people.
Morten Meldgaard: This is a Dorset harpoon head
which is quite different it has sort
of facial markings.
In the Dorset culture, we have much more lively
expression of shamanism and spiritual things.
There is evidence further south that the Saqqaq and
Dorset briefly overlapped.
Narrator: Either the Saqqaq radically
transformed into the Dorset culture or they
are entirely different people who crossed
each other's tracks.
A band of mossy turf marking the end of the
Saqqaq culture exposes an intriguing possibility.
Morten Meldgaard: It indicates a period of
time with more moisture and probably also a
cooler climate.
Climate change here has a quite significant
influence on the survival of people.
Narrator: During this time, the site was
completely abandoned until the Dorset appeared
roughly 700 years later.
Two possibilities emerge: either climate change
triggered the collapse of the Saqqaq or it forced
their culture to move on and evolve
into the Dorset.
The only way for Eske to know for sure
is to start lining up his strands of DNA.
Back in Copenhagen, his team has begun to piece
together Inuk's physical appearance.
By matching up snippets of his code to a global
database of modern human DNA, they start to
rebuild an image of their Stone Age hunter.
Each trait they uncover leads them closer to
revealing the Saqqaq's origins, and the bigger
picture of human migration into
the new world.
Eske Willerslev: We have actually found evidence
in multiple places in the genome that Inuk has been
genetically adapted to living in
an Arctic environment.
And I find that quite interesting, given that
he's actually the first people getting into the
high Arctic, right?
These people have adapted very quickly,
I mean, people that weren't able
to handle the very low temperatures
would probably disappear quite quickly.
Narrator: From this genetic insight,
illustrator Nuka Godtfredsen begins to
sketch out Inuk's profile.
Eske Willerslev: In terms of body stature,
you would probably have had low surface
area to body mass.
He would have been most likely very stocky built
in order to avoid loss of heat from his surface.
When we're diving deeper and deeper into the
genome, you know, first we start getting a kind
of just all appearance of this particular
individual, the body structure.
But then you start building up a face of
this Inuk you're almost getting a personal
relationship to this long dead individual, right?
Which is quite amazing, when you are thinking
about that what you started off with just a
tuft of hair.
Narrator: After months scanning the
streams of code, the fragments
of Inuk's image fall into place.
Suddenly, the code breakers find themselves
staring into the eyes of their Stone Age hunter.
They've isolated a key pattern in the genome
that tells them Inuk had brown eyes.
While the eyes are often the most revealing about
a person, for Eske's team, they're a dead end.
Brown eyes are the most common in the world.
Surprisingly, it's the quirky shape of Inuk's
teeth that gives them their first big lead.
Eske Willerslev: Here we see a single
substitution, from a T to a C, where the common one
is a T, but Inuk has a C.
And this particular position that really
means that he has a special type of front
teeth the inner side of the teeth kind of have a
shovel-form type of shape.
Narrator: Inuk's distinctive teeth narrow
down the possibilities.
Just as winning the lottery can come down to
a single number, a single letter of code can make
all the difference in pinpointing
Inuk's origins.
Eske Willerslev: The deeper we went into
interpreting the genomic information, the more we
started getting a portrait of this
individual Inuk appearing.
We could see that he most likely had brown skin he
seems to have a tendency to baldness.
He had dry ear wax, instead of wet ear wax,
which is actually quite typical for Asians.
Narrator: On their own, these traits seem random,
but stitched together, they're leading Eske to
an unexpected revelation about Inuk's roots.
But the clincher is when they discover his
distinctive type A blood.
Eske Willerslev: The blood type could suggest
that maybe he came a long way from Greenland,
you know?
That he's not related to any of the New World
people like Native Americans and
present-day Inuits.
And so, so together with, you know, reconstructing
the facial features of Inuk, you kind of start
getting this hint that maybe he was
something very different.
Of course, this is super exciting, because then it
starts changing the common view of migration
into the New World.
Narrator: To confirm their hunch that Saqqaq
may be genetically unique, they compare
Inuk's DNA side-by-side with DNA from native
Inuit people living in Greenland today.
The results are conclusive there is no
direct DNA link between them.
The Saqqaq people went extinct.
Eske Willerslev: The conclusion we must draw
from the genome of Inuk is that, for whatever
reason, they basically died out.
They came into this unexplored land and
presumably did really well for a
few thousand years.
Then something must have hit them, because they
just seem to disappear at that time.
Narrator: One possibility is that, as the climate
grew colder around Disko Bay, the Saqqaq followed
their food supply to the warmer waters
of southern Greenland.
In these new hunting grounds, they may have
clashed with the Dorset people.
Eske Willerslev: You definitely start
wondering what could be the reason for the
disappearance; one scenario could be that,
due to the competition of resources, later people
like the Dorset pushed out or caused the
extinction of Inuk's people.
Narrator: With the revelation that Inuk's
people went extinct, Eske's quest takes an
abrupt turn.
As he attempts to pinpoint Inuk's exact origins,
the trail of DNA leads him
further than expected.
A discovery, thousands of miles from where Inuk's
hair was found, is about to shake up the history
of not just the Arctic, but the entire New World.
Narrator: DNA is to modern science what astronomy
was to the Age of Galileo.
For Eske and his team, rebuilding Inuk the first
complete ancient genome is like discovering
a new planet.
Now, they have to place his origins in the vast
universe of human genetics.
Poring over a map of all known DNA of people
living today, they finally find a match.
Eske Willerslev: We are actually looking at
around one million specific positions in the
genome, and then comparing them to a
number of people in the Old World, from
northeastern Siberia, China, Europe,
Africa, et cetera.
And then we can actually pinpoint, you know,
which populations from today are most
closely related to Inuk.
And there, it seems like he's falling together
with Chukchi and Koryaks these Old World
populations from northeastern Siberia.
Narrator: The realization that Inuk's roots lie
deep in Siberia is a bombshell.
It's hard proof that the Saqqaq were not part of
any known migrations into the New World.
Eske Willerslev: The traditional view is that
there has been two, possibly three migrations
into the New World.
And what Inuk tells us is that this is not correct.
Narrator: The picture of how the New World was
settled used to be very simple.
The first wave of people reached the Americas by
crossing a land bridge over the Bering Strait.
The Inuit people were a second wave, settling in
Alaska and the Canadian Arctic.
But this new Saqqaq migration from the heart
of Siberia is a curveball 5,000 years ago, they
made an epic journey all the way across the brutal
Arctic into Greenland.
What's most impressive is that they did it at a
time when there was no land bridge across the
Bering Strait.
As the Ice Age ended, rising sea levels wiped
out the main passageway to the Americas.
Eske Willerslev: The old idea of peopling of the
Americas is that people came to the New World
through this land bridge at a time where you can
say that those two land masses
were still connected.
But Inuk's people expansion into the New
World definitely happened where it was water in
between the two continents.
So they must have made it either by boat or over
the ice in the winter time.
It's a remarkable journey.
Narrator: Their story is a marvel of
the Stone Age.
But without the DNA of Inuk's hair,
it may never have been told.
How many other stories like the Saqqaq are out
there waiting to be uncovered?
Eske Willerslev: We see typically as scientists
these events of spreading as
something very simple, right?
I would say what Inuk really, I mean, tells me
is that, that, you know, there's probably been
many trial and errors, you know, not only for
the Americas and for Greenland, but other
places in the world as well.
We don't see that by just looking at the modern
genetics we have to go back in time and explore
the human material, and then we can actually get
glimpse of these trial and errors.
It shows us that things are a bit more
messy than we thought.
It's a much richer story, much more exciting
really, from my point of view.
Narrator: Only now that they know where Inuk came
from can they add the finishing touches
to his portrait.
To fill in the blanks, Eske and artist Nuka
Godtfredsen study photographs of Chukchis
from Siberia.
At last, months of sweating the
details pay off.
Like a ghost, the face of their Stone Age
hunter finally appears.
Morten Meldgaard: All of a sudden, we are sitting
face to face with Inuk.
I mean, it's very different, having a look
at a piece of human bone.
There's a big jump from that to be able to see
these people face to face.
Narrator: For Eske, the completion of the first
ancient genome is the achievement of a lifetime.
But this isn't the end of the story it's
a brand new beginning for science.
The race is on, to find the next genetic insight
into how we got to where we are today.
Eske's convinced there will be many more
Inuks to come.
Eske Willerslev: In science, you always have
to do one example to show, well,
this is indeed possible.
Inuk opened the door into a complete new level of
ancient genetics, really.
And also on understanding human history.