A hair sample has been used by scientists to recreate a detailed picture of an ancient Greenlander. A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen claims to have reconstructed the first detailed ancient human genome, naming the discovery Inuk – the Greenlandic word for man.

Analysis of a tuft of hair located in the 1980s in Greenland was used by the scientists to make the reconstruction possible. The DNA from the hair was the used a blueprint to complete the genetic building blocks of the original owner, with noted illustrator Nuka Godfredsten compiling an image of what Inuk may have looked like. “Inuk’s receding hairline, brown eyes, dark skin and shovel-shaped front teeth are all dictated by his 4,000 year-old genetic coding,” said Godfredsten.

There has been little evidence of Greenland’s ancient human inhabitation, with the exception of some bone and hair samples. Greenlanders’ closest living relatives, genetically speaking, can be traced to modern-day Siberia. According to the Copenhagen Post, the new findings suggest that natives from that area made the trip over the polar ice around 4,400 to 6,400 years ago. Similar attempts to recreate the DNA structure of creatures such as the woolly mammoth have stumbled due to limitations in current technology.

Head of the international team which made the groundbreaking reconstruction, Professor Eske Willerslev, claimed new technology was behind the breakthrough. ”Previously, the DNA needed to have been frozen or buried in a layer of permafrost. But with the new methods developed here at the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, that is not a premise anymore”.

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