Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Roughly 19,000 years in the past, a girl from a hunter-gatherer group handed away and was interred in a cave positioned in northern Spain. In 1996, archaeologists started investigating this website, uncovering substantial proof of prehistoric human exercise.
Pink Girl’s skeleton. Credit score: College of New Mexico
In 2010, Lawrence Straus, an Emeritus Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor at The College of New Mexico, together with Spanish pupil David Cuenca Solana, found the lady’s stays. This discovery occurred after Straus determined to excavate behind an engraved block on the rear of El Mirón Cave’s massive vestibule—a website he and his colleague Professor Manuel Gonzalez Morales from Universidad de Cantabria have been exploring for over 25 years.
The girl was estimated to be between 35 and 40 years previous at her time of loss of life. Her bones had been lined with ochre—a pink pigment not native to the world—containing specular hematite that gave it a glowing look. This distinctive characteristic led to her being named “the Pink Girl of El Mirón.” Since this discovery, she has supplied archaeologists and bioanthropologists with outstanding insights.
Historically in archaeology and DNA research, genetic materials is extracted from bones or tooth discovered inside human stays; this was true for the Pink Girl as effectively. Nonetheless, groundbreaking analysis now additionally makes use of DNA extracted from soil—often known as sedimentary historic DNA or “sedaDNA”—which has unveiled new particulars about each human and animal populations that existed earlier than the period of the Pink Girl of Mirón.
An article titled “A sedimentary historic DNA perspective on human and carnivore persistence by the Late Pleistocene in El Mirón Cave, Spain” has been printed in Nature Communications. This analysis was performed by a staff led by Pere Gelabert and Victoria Oberreiter from Professor Ron Pinhasi’s lab on the Division of Evolutionary Anthropology, College of Vienna, Austria. About three years in the past, Professor Ron Pinhasi approached Straus to discover sedaDNA evaluation at El Mirón Cave. Straus contributed archaeological, chronological, and faunal knowledge in addition to references for this research and authored supplementary materials for the paper. The analysis concerned extracting human and animal mitochondrial DNA from sediments discovered within the website’s decrease ranges.
“We do not want bones,” Straus mentioned. “The outcomes present that a number of animals not represented by bones from the dig had been current—both as soon as residing within the cave or as carcass items—up to now and, importantly, the people who made the Solutrean artifacts throughout the top of the Final Glacial Most (about 25,000 to 21,000 years in the past) had ‘Fournol’ genetic ancestry, as has been present in bones or tooth from websites in France and Spain (together with La Riera in Asturias, a website dug by Straus within the Seventies).
Sampling process on the rear vestibule of the Cave. Credit score: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-55740-7
“These had been the individuals whose vary had contracted southward throughout the climatic disaster and who preceded the Pink Girl of El Miron and contributed to her DNA, together with DNA of Villabruna ancestry derived from people whose genes had come to Cantabrian Spain in Decrease Magdalenian instances from the Balkans by way of northern Italy.”
The flexibility to extract DNA from grime makes it way more attainable to review historic animals and people, since bones with well-preserved DNA, particularly from people, are uncommon.
“As with the whole lot else at El Miron DNA-wise, the preservation of DNA in grime right here is extraordinary. We now know who the predecessors of the Pink Girl had been, confirming proof from different websites with DNA from bones and tooth.”
SedaDNA evaluation reveals the presence of assorted carnivores and ungulates at El Mirón, together with species just like the dhole—a wild canine now restricted to japanese and southeastern Asia—in addition to leopards, hyenas, woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses, and reindeer. These findings are vital as a result of they determine species which are both scarcely or by no means represented by the bones beforehand found by archaeologists. The sedaDNA proof spans a timeline from over 46,000 years in the past throughout Mousterian-Neanderthal instances to the Preliminary Magdalenian interval round 21,000 to twenty,000 years in the past.
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“That is one other methodological and empirical breakthrough, just like the DNA analysis on pure merchandise that will have therapeutic worth from micro organism preserved within the Pink Girl’s dental calculus printed in Science by Warinner, Pierre Stallforth, Martin Klapper and colleagues in Jena,” Straus mentioned.
“In the meantime, we proceed to publish on the fundamental archaeology of El Mirón—the seasonality of human occupations from the animals that they hunted, which is decided from tooth and bone growth, stone instruments, bone instruments akin to needles, and weapons akin to factors.”
The research was printed within the journal Nature Communications
Written by Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com Workers Author
